Just as you do not use an electric drill to put a nail in a wall, you need to use right kind of information resource to find the right kind of information. It is an important lesson to learn that applies to all kinds of searching.
If you are just looking for a copy of a story already published or broadcast, often the original publication's website is a good place to start. Television stations have started to provide video clips and archives of video and text materials for free or inexpensively. Public Broadcasting's News Hour with Jim Lehrer goes so far as giving you audio and text transcripts of the nightly news program. CNN provides transcripts of most of its programs as well as video streaming. Search engines AltaVista and Lycos are among several search engines that now offer video clips that are searchable by keyword. Most transcripts are searchable by keyword.
Many newspapers and magazines provide free access, but force you to register so they can gather marketing information about you and/or for you. Others require passwords or payment. Some publications provide access to one or two stories to encourage you to purchase the hard copy of the magazine, and still others provide free access to that day's news, but make money by selling copies of archived material for a modest fee.
Generally speaking, the free news resources do not come anywhere close to replacing commercial online news databases; the main commercial news vendors are Factiva, Thomson's Dialog, and LexisNexis. These feebased services offer unmatched depth of coverage. At best, the Internet's leading free resources offer a two weeks' worth of coverage or a few dozen stories about a subject; the commercial services add thousands of new articles every day and maintain deep archives that are available on demand. In addition, the commercial services offer a full range of searching options, like field searching and Boolean capabilities.
Specialized Tools, the giant supermarkets of information for news are LexisNexis, Factiva, the Dow Jones/Reuters combination, and Thomson's Dialog.
What makes all of these tools so valuable is the depth of their resources. LexisNexis, for example, has full-text newspaper files going back to the 1970s. And each of these tools offers different newspaper collections, regional search capability and different dates of coverage.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Charlie W. Mysen at 09012010
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