What's News on the Internet

What's News on the Internet
Finding news when you need it
April 1996

For Internet users, getting first quality news when you want it is easy. Hundreds of newspapers and information services publish news reports each day - and most of them are available for free.

The New York Times, my second most favorite site, offers a daily newspaper called TimesFAX that's designed for facsimile transmission but also put on the World Wide Web using the popular Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable document format).

This well-designed "short-version" of the daily paper includes news from the front page, international, United States, business, op-ed, and sports sections. It even has a daily crossword puzzle. It's formatted into a compact 8-page publication, ready for downloading, viewing, and printing from web address http://nytimesfax.com/times.pdf.

The New York Times also offers longer articles at http://www.nytimes.com, including complete texts of the major information pieces from the daily print version of the paper.

A quick search of the Yahoo Internet index, http://www.yahoo.com, yielded 1,273 separate entries for newspapers on the Internet. Of these, about 325 were listed as publications serving a metropolitan area. Some of these papers, I'm sure, have greater notoriety than others - but even The Idyllwild (California) Town Crier was interesting to read.

If reading a newspaper online isn't for you, try one of the new online news services. Crayon (Create Your Own Newspaper) at http://crayon.net, allows you to create a newspaper based on your own needs from major news sources, including CNN, USA Today, Time, ABC News, and PBS. Other sources are also available, including audio clips from NPR (National Public Radio).

SIFT, http://sift.stanford.edu, searches the USENET newsgroups on the Internet for messages containing keywords that you specify. You can even select words that should not be included in the responses. With over 15,000 newsgroups in active use, this could be one of the best sources for technical, scientific, and cultural information yet available in electronic form.

Many companies publish industry-specific information on the Internet, too. For example, DGL publishes it's facsimile and email newsletters on it's website, http://dgl.com. And don't forget, The Business Monthly is online at http://www.fwdj.com/monthly/monthly.html. This is my favorite newspaper site.

David Stephen Murphy is President and CEO of Damar Group, Ltd. which presents computer training classes, publishes computer learning guides, and helps organizations do business on the Internet. The website is http://dgl.com, and Mr. Murphy may be reached at dave@dgl.com or 410.567.5366.

updated October 22, 1996
http://dgl.com/tbm/tbm9604.html