News Search, Blogs and Feeds

A Toolkit

Lars Vage, Lars Iselid

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781780631813
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: UI/UX Design

This book is about news search and monitoring. Aimed at professionals with a strategic need of monitoring the surrounding world, users with a need to find the best news sources, monitoring services and news search strategies and techniques will benefit from reading this book. The main purpose is to present a practical handbook with an analysis of readily available tools, blending with passages of a theoretical nature. It is also useful for students at LIS programmes and related information programmes and for librarians and information professionals. The authors aim to aid the reader in reaching a greater understanding of the core in news search and monitoring.

• Presents effective tools to evaluate news search engines and databases
• Harness the power of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds in online news search and monitoring
• Learn how to navigate and critically question the news found in the blogosphere

1

Introduction: the nature of news search

Abstract:

News search on the internet began to develop only following the events of 11 September 2001 in the US. The online audience for news is continually growing; even so, a large amount of news content is still available only in print media. Content can range from news articles, press releases, photos and news agency output to blog posts, video and podcasts. There are differences between what newspapers publish in their print and web editions, and not everything can be found using the free news search engines; further, the text of articles by freelance journalists can often still be accessible only via microfilm. The free news search engines, commercial databases, professional search services and news monitoring services all provide different coverage, levels of indexing and search facilities.

Key words

news search engines

news sources

web news

This introduction explores the nature of news search and its relationship to different news sources such as newspaper websites, news agencies, broadcast news, press release wires and blogs. Although news search engines started to appear in the mid 1990s it became painfully obvious in 2001 that there was a very real need for powerful news search tools on the internet. This started the rapid development by major search engine companies of specialized news search engines to crawl and index major news sources in near real-time. Even though a vast quantity of news articles are constantly being published on the web, there is still a great deal of content that is available only in the printed versions. News search engines also face many difficulties resulting from the unstructured nature of web news as compared to the more structured and more easily indexed printed articles.

Discovering the power of news search

Although many use the terms ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ interchangeably, I think that journalism also encompasses something much more important – context. (Matt Thompson, Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri)¹

One of the first examples of the power and significance of news search on the internet occurred in the autumn of 2001; more specifically, on 11 September, when two hijacked airliners destroyed the World Trade Center in New York. Servers at several western media sites broke down because of the numbers of people desperately seeking for news on the internet about the traumatic event. Google reported that search for news-related content increased by a factor of 60 on that date.² That morning a message on the Google front page said: ‘If you’re looking for news, you will find the most current information on TV and radio.’ In the afternoon Google showed only direct links to media sites and cached copies, and again the message to use TV and radio (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 In the afternoon of 11 September 2001 Google’s home page linked to news sites, including cached copies as they appeared earlier

In those early days, when Google was not yet so dominant, it didn’t have a specialized search engine for news. Search engines overall were not such powerful tools for finding current news as they are nowadays, and not many put any extra effort into crawling news sources more frequently than other sites. The autumn of 2001 was a milestone in the transition not just of traditional broadcasting media such as radio and TV, but also of the internet and search engines as tools for finding and navigating information about current events. In July 2003 Krishna Bharat, who conceived the idea for Google News, wrote in Google Friends Newsletter that: ‘Following September 11, I realized it would be useful to see news reporting from multiple sources on a given topic assembled in one place.’³ This was actually written a long time after the first appearance of news search, although it was still in a state of immaturity.

News searching and browsing is currently one of the most popular activities on the internet. According to a survey conducted by Pew Internet and published in August 2008, 70 per cent of all American internet users are online on a typical day. Thirty per cent of them check news and 49 per cent search online. This activity was surpassed only by email, which 60 per cent of Americans used.⁴. Pew Internet also did some surveys concerning the 2008 presidential campaign and found that 6 out of 10 internet users went online in 2008 for campaign news.⁵

Pew discovered that many news consumers are turning to alternative distribution channels and different ‘screens’, even for news coming from traditional media sources. Among those who had read a news story from a newspaper organization on the previous day:

69 per cent had read a printed copy of a newspaper

61 per cent of those who used the internet (representing 52 per cent of all news readers) had read a news story online on a computer

6 per cent of cell phone owners had read a news story on a cell phone, and 7 per cent had done so using a Blackberry, iPhone or some other Smartphone.⁶

The online newspaper audience is constantly growing. Statistics from the Newspaper Association of America show that in the US it was 42 per cent of the total internet audience in April 2009, up from 26 per cent in December 2004. In December 2004 each visitor looked at 36 pages and spent 34 minutes reading. By April 2009 this had increased to 46 pages per visitor and 40 minutes of reading.⁷ Searching and browsing news is not just an important activity for everyday users; it’s also extremely important for many professionals doing business intelligence tracking, both of their competitors and of their own brand.

The concept of news and its relations

Let us explain what we mean by the term ‘news’. News is seen as an official message about something important that readers didn’t know about before: an event, a process or some kind of condition. News reporting, in turn, is about how mass media, for example newspapers, collect and prepare news. ‘Mass media’ refers to those channels of communication that are designed to be consumed by large audiences, primarily newspapers, TV, radio and the internet. We could also include films, magazines and books; on the internet we could point to videos, blogs and podcasts. Also, we shouldn’t forget the web accessed via mobile phones and game consoles.

News can be presented in many different media, as we have just described, and a news publisher can use many different channels. Using only the printed newspaper format provides an opportunity to write text and show pictures; using radio enables the use of audio; while television can use moving pictures, audio and written text. The internet and mobile phones provide the possibility of using written text, showing pictures and videos and also playing audio such as online radio or podcasts. In that respect the internet and mobile phones present news publishers with an opportunity for a significantly richer media experience, but this also means bigger challenges – especially when it comes to generating revenue from the free provision of news.

Today many different kinds of news and news-related content are published, such as news articles, press releases, stories from news agencies and blog posts. The results pages of many news search engines contain a confusing mix of all these different kinds of written content. In some cases videos, news photos and podcasts are also included in the results.

A press release (PR) is commonly described as a written or recorded communication sent out to the news media from an organization, a public institution or a company for the purpose of making the receiver aware of something with news value. It is often sent by regular mail, email or fax; and many use commercial newswire services to distribute their press releases. Press releases are not written objectively, but rather with the aim of marketing a product or promoting a statement. In some cases PR marketing agencies are hired to write them, which means there can be a degree of divergence between the originator and the writer, even when the release is approved by the originator. Many journalists read press releases and write their own news stories based on them. It is hoped that these will be more objective, but often they merely confirm what has already been stated in the press release.

Newswires from news agencies are used both by newspapers themselves and by news search engines. When there is a news drought it’s not uncommon for some issues of local newspapers to be completely dominated by stories from news agencies, with very few stories produced by newspaper staff. A news agency can be commercial, with the purpose of selling news, like Reuters and UPI; others work in cooperation with media companies and distribute their news centrally, like Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP). There are also a lot of non-profit news agencies. The South African Civil Society Information Service (SACSIS) focuses on social justice news and analysis of policy dialogue in South Africa. Indymedia focuses on political and social issues. Zenit reports on the Catholic Church. There are also government-controlled news agencies like ITAR-TASS in Russia and Xinhua in China.

To gain more insight into the possible biases or hidden agendas of some types of news agencies you have to check the organizations and financing behind them. SACSIS is governed by a board of trustees drawn from civil society, such as activists and practitioners working in academia and non...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction: the nature of news search
• Chapter 2: Free news search
• Chapter 3: Professional news search services
• Chapter 4: News monitoring services
• Chapter 5: Evaluating news search tools
• Chapter 6: Keeping track of the blogosphere
• Chapter 7: The power of RSS
• Chapter 8: News discovery via social networking tools
• Chapter 9: Concluding remarks
• Further reading
• Index