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I've talked about the advantages of newspaper web sites over the "major vendors" in terms of breaking news. Barbara Quint, in "Newspapers on the Run" (Information Today, Dec. 2006), points out other reasons to use web sites instead of the costly premium services.

For one thing, most newspapers produce web-only content, while the premium online services typically only carry the archive articles that appear in the hard copy paper. Even their coverage of the hard copy often comes with certain exceptions such as letters to the editor and syndicated columns, among other things. In addition, web sites typically include links to sources and comments from readers, which, often aren't reflected in the costly archives of the aggregators.

What does all this mean? According to Barbara, "The bottom line is that if a searcher (end user or information professional) goes after everything that a newspaper has published on a topic, the expensive fee-based services could not honestly promise to find it." All that money spent for limited coverage? How long can that last?

I mentioned in a previous entry that the big news aggregators such as Lexis, Westlaw and Factiva sometimes struggle to deliver breaking news. Not so for most free web sites; they offer current stuff, often extremely current. If you want to know what happened in the last hour, check web news. Set up an alert on Yahoo News or Google News and you'll get up to the minute news in your inbox in very short order.

Older news is a whole different story. Most web news sites don't offer the deep historical archives like the premium aggregators, though there's been some progress in that area. For example, Topix now offers content going back as far as a year.

But the big development in archive news comes from, of course, Google. They recently announced their Google News Archive Search, with content going back over 200 years. Where do they get news that old? Google supplements the free web sources with the traditional, for-fee services that are willing to give you one article for a price.

Try running a search on Google News Archive, then click on the dates links on the left side, and explore. The farther back you go in time, the more for-fee content you'll see, labeled "Pay Per View" from such vendors as Proquest, Newsbank and the New York Times. Though I didn't spot any, apparently Factiva, LexisNexis Thomson Gale and Highbeam Research also offer content according to an article from Search Engine Watch, "Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search."

It's not just news. As noted by Robert Ambrogli , case law also pops up in the search results from services such as FastCase and LoisLaw.

Google News Archive is reminiscent of Northern Light Remember when they tried to do something very similar with their web search engine, incorporating premium content with free web sources? It didn't work too well for them, but then, they weren't Google.

If you're looking for news, old or new, you might want to start with Google News and Archive News. It won't do everything the big guys do, but if you're lucky, you may find what you want there, at a fraction of the price you might normally pay.

For more information see:

Google Debuts 200 Year News Archive Search, by Chris Sherman (SearchEngineWatch.com)

InfoToday Newsbreak, Traditional Information Industry Opens Premium Content to Google News Archive, by Barbara Quint

In a world where journalists are feeling like an endangered species, there's still a great deal of value placed on news content. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about news lately. There's ever changing sea of the stuff out there, and getting a handle on it isn't easy. Westlaw's Intraclip platform closes down on September 15th, after which the new Westlaw Watch will be the platform of choice for providing Newsroom stories to your Intranet, and/or to deliver email alerts.

Lexis Publisher, the Lexis equivalent, is a more sophisticated and hence, more complicated tool and offers the benefit of the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Wires, and other Factiva content. Lexis has added Continuous Alerts to their arsenal, probably in response to the yells of former Factiva subscribers who were torn from the bosom of Factiva kicking and screaming, as well as complaints from everyone else who wanted updated news as it happens. And, by the way, Lexis Eclipses are now called Lexis Alerts, a logical name change whichever way you look at it.

In other developments, the Financial Times is now embargoed on Lexis, Westlaw, Factiva, and other third party news aggregators. You can get the Financial Times on these services; you just have to wait 24 hours to do it, not always a satisfying prospect. If you can't wait, you'll have to pay more money and subscribe directly. The Financial Times isn't the only publication that imposes an embargo, and many journal articles don't get picked up for weeks.

Lexis and Westlaw have huge news databases, with very deep archives, but they seem to struggle to get the new stuff loaded as quickly as it appears on the web. Some newspaper web sites post articles hours, sometimes days before the big guys get a hold of them. The free Google News or Yahoo News can sometimes deliver up to the minute news faster than the premium services. Ignore web news at your peril.

Things are happening very fast these days, with information and mis-information spreading like wildfire throughout the blog world. In an interesting development, Lexis has announced that they are including selected blogs from Newstex Blogs On Demand in their news database. How long will it be before the premium services have to include web news as well in order to be as comprehensive as possible?

Because right now, there's no one place to go to get everything out there. There never has been, but with the abundance of digital content, the expectations of our patrons are high, and a combination of web news and premium news is essential when you want to be comprehensive. And there's still no guarantee you've got it all.

Sometimes it really is a good idea to have a live person edit the news instead of a computer. At least that seems to be the moral of the story told by Rich Wiggins on "How to Spam Google News" Part 1 & 2.

In a nutshell, Rich figured out that a political candidate was planting what the average reader would undoubtedly consider to be "non-stories" on Google News , for what I guess are obvious reasons. Rich and a few of his friends tried issuing press releases to see if they, too, could get their stuff carried by Google News, and low and behold, it worked. The word spread, as these things do on the Internet, resulting in several fake stories with misinformation being posted to Google News. It makes for fascinating reading, so see Wigblog for the full-details.

Beleaguered newspaper editors should feel somewhat vindicated. There is actually a reason for their existence. On the other hand, maybe people find fake news to be more interesting than the real thing!

The new Nexis interface was introduced in the U.S. earlier this month, according to an InfoToday Newsbreak by Marydee Ojala.

I can't help but be a bit frustrated reading the features list, which includes customized content based on the user's country, an Easy Search interface with check boxes for limiting search results to news, company, industry, people, and/or countries. And, how cool is this, clustering technology that suggests other articles on similar topics. But why am I frustrated? Because legal customers, at least currently, don't have access to the Nexis platform, which, as far as I can tell from screenshots, was more intuitive and easy to use than the News section of Lexis.com, even before the facelift.

I hope I'm wrong about that, and we all get to use these improvements sometime soon!

No one can complain about a scarcity of news content. There's a LOT of news on the web, some of which probably isn't really fit to print, from both free sites, and not so free ones. But one can legitimately whine about the difficulty of finding RELEVANT news, no more and no less. To my mind, a controlled vocabulary, preferably one reviewed by real people, is crucial to finding what you want. Full-text searching on its own isn't enough.

The news offered by Lexis and Westlaw include indexing terms, but they don't put these important terms front & center, rather they hide them in segments, requiring users to ferret them out and then try to determine how to make use of them.

They could learn something from Inform.com, a new beta site that aggregates and indexes hundreds of newspapers and magazines. Inform apparently knows a not-so-well-kept secret of researchers who use index terms to increase the relevancy of news search results, that is, the best way to find the appropriate index terms for your particular search is to find an relevant article in any way you can, usually by running a full-text search, then seeking out the index terms applied to that article and using them to refine and expand your search. This process is usually not the domain of the beginning searchers.

But Inform indexes the news, then offers a slew of features based on that indexing, making it easy for the user to find additional articles on any facet or topic related to the currently viewed article. For example, select an article from the front page. The full-text is displayed with a menu across the top, called the Discovery Area, which includes links for People, Places, Organizations, Topics, Industries and Products. I'm looking at an article on American Airlines. If I want to read more about the general state of the airline industry, I can select Industry from the top for a new list of articles. Or I can select People, and click on Ron Hunter for additional articles relating to him. I'm hoping that RSS feeds for custom channels are in the works.

There's much more here, but you can explore yourself. I've only touched the surface of Inform's capabilities. All I can say is, it's a different way of looking at the news.

Do you know the difference between personalization and customization? Greg Linden, at Findory.com, does: "..personalization learns what you like from your actions...customization requires you to explicity specify what you want..." Considering the difficulty in getting people to do their own customization, personalization obviously has a lot of advantages in a many different areas. Personalization is what Amazon uses to display other items that might interest you, and it's what Findory uses to give you the news that you want to read. If that sounds interesting to you, take a look at the recent Searcher article by Gary Price, "Good Things Come in Small Packages, or Findory Gets Personal."

I remember the exact moment that I became interested in the potential of RSS for research. I'd been familiar with RSS for several years and played around with feeds a bit, but RSS just wasn't thrilling me. Then I read Steven Cohen's article in Information Outlook, "The RSS revolution: Using RSS: An Explanation and Guide." When he said that he monitored news on a particular company via RSS I was hooked. My only complaint? He didn't detail how to do so in that particular article. But that's okay....he wrote a book!

There are a variety of ways to find and deliver news information to your organization, including tools offered by proprietary services as well as free options on the web. My presentation at the recent SCALL Institute discusses the methods of delivery, vendor tools, web services and a brief introduction to RSS feeds. (Be aware that the presentation is 3 meg in size, and could take some time to download.)

The traditional online venders, Lexis, Westlaw and Factiva all offer email alert services. These services notify users of new information added to the selected database that meets a specific search criteria. Figuring out which one best suits your needs can be difficult as there are sometimes subtle, sometimes significant, differences between them. I've summarized the basic features of these premium alerts in this handout compiled for my presentation at the SCALL Institute. Please do comment if you have any additional insights on any of these services.

[3/4/2004: Correction made on handout. Cost of full-text articles referenced in Westlaw's Intraclips is $2.75 per document.]

I will be presenting at the SCALL (Southern California Association of Law Libraries) Institute, Feb. 28th, on the various ways to deliver news and current information. Below is the bibliography for the session which includes selected materials on blogging, RSS, intranets and content licensing. I've included links when the materials are available on the web. Thanks to Marlene Bubrick for making this bibliography presentable.