Journalism Research and Random Meanderings

Thursday, December 30, 2004

JournalismNet's Top Ten of 2004 Provides Excellent Alternative News Sources 

Among the Google tools, RSS newsfeed software, and blog and news search engines in JNet'sTop Ten of Picks 2004 are some off-the-beaten-path news collections.

Included in the yearly round-up of top news providers and useful Web sites are:

"Columbia University's Newsblaster. This news spider crawls a series of Web sites every night, downloads articles, groups them together into "clusters" about the same topic, and summarizes each cluster. The end result is a Web page that gives you a sense of the day's major stories. There are no human editors involved -- everything you see on the main page is generated automatically, drawing on the sources listed on the left side of the screen. Newsblaster is an academic project from the Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science."


===Most of the sources Newsblaster works with are American with a few international sources rounding it out. There are plans to enhance the service with more sources, languages and multi-day event-tracking ability. - PB===


The Newseum's "Today's Front Pages" Every morning, more than 300 newspapers from around the world submit their front pages to the Newseum via the Internet. .... The electronic files are printed out on large-format printers at the Newseum's offices in Arlington, Va., then are transported to the Pennsylvania Avenue site and mounted inside the 98-foot-long steel and Plexiglas display by 8:30 a.m., seven days a week. All of the front pages received that morning are then posted on the Newseum's Web site. The full selection of each day's front pages is available on the Web site by 9:30 a.m. daily."

===Front pages are a compelling mix of text and art. They provide an interesting snapshot of each paper's view of their readership. - PB===


===This is rivetting!! Reuters Feedroom lets you watch the latest TV news from Reuters News. Channels are: top news, world stories, business, life, entertainment and the quirky Oddly Enough. Today's page had some 143 videos ranging from raw footage of the tsunami aftermath to fully-formed segments. Videos are a few minutes long and may not have voiceovers. One the easiest web sites to use to get a glimpse of breaking TV news. Just click on it and it will roll a selection of the available footage or pick a channel and work through it on your own. -PB ===


===The next choice is a disappointment. It seems while the BBC broadcasts live via Windows Media Player (WMP) it archives shows in Real Player (RP) format only. If you've used RealPlayer recently you'll know why this is not a good thing. After upgrading RP a while ago it started popping up ads. I banned RP from my computers after the first few interuptions. While I'm not a fan of Microsoft at least WMP stays in the background and just plays the stream. I can't agree with J-Net's characterisation of RP as an "easy, free player". If you're willing to tolerate RP you can choose from dozens of BBC's top World Service programs.-PB===

===P.S. J-Net itself is one the web's best collections of journalism research and training resources. -PB===