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Lost in Cyberspace

These sites help you find all the news

This article was originally published on November 2, 1999 by SignOn San Diego and Copley News Service.

As newspapers rushed in near-panic to get on the Web earlier this decade, news junkies (the affectionate term for those whose lives revolve around staying up on the latest headlines) found themselves in hog heaven.

As if CNN on cable or the retail availability of police scanners hadn't been godsend enough, now just about every network and newspaper on Earth is available online, 24 hours a day, and usually for free.

Finding all these news resources can be tough if you don't know where to look, though. Who wants to sort through thousands of hits after looking up "newspaper" or "news" on a search engine?

By bookmarking a few of the better news guides, though, you can make finding that news site you want a whole lot easier.

One of the newest guides to online news is also one of the best. AssignmentEditor.com does a really nice job of blending comprehensive listings and ease of use.

The main page is almost all plain text listings of news resources. On one page are more than 60 of the nation's largest daily papers, a dozen or so leading papers from around the world, sports news sites, entertainment news sites, the TV networks' news operations, business news sites, and specialized sites for news on politics, health and weather.

There are also links to various search engines and Internet white and yellow page directories, reverse directories, online travel guides and services, online maps and language translation.

It is about as complete a guide to online news as exists.

Yahoo's News and Media guide probably has just as many resources as AssignmentEditor.com, but, as with all Yahoo categories, the organization of information is very vertical – meaning you're going to do a lot of clicking before you find what you want. Still, their listing of columnists is worth checking out.

Another site for finding newspapers online (but no other news resources, unfortunately), is run by the newspaper industry's trade magazine, Editor & Publisher. E&P's Media Links lists just about any and every newspaper with a Web site, from small-town weeklies to the New York Times, from alternative weeklies to ethnic publications, from the world's cosmopolitan capitals to the weekly Virakesari of Colombo, Sri Lanka, which touts itself as "The First Tamil News Paper In The Internet."

For finding links to broadcast news operations, a quick and dirty guide can be found at the news page of Broadcast.com.

Netscape also has a news directory. Like Yahoo's, it's a bit too vertical for easy use – but may have resources the others don't.