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Clipping

Clipping the news

Too much to read and not enough time to read it? If you feel this way, you are not alone. Keeping up with critical developments that affect you and your business can be a daunting task. "Clipping" cannot do the reading for you, but it sure can help you gather and manage business information more efficiently.

Several online services offer 'clipping services'. They select the news that you want - 24 hours a day - from a continuous stream of stories from newspapers, magazines, news agencies and newsletters.

You select stories by giving the online service a set of search terms. The hits are sent to your electronic mailbox, for you to read at will.

Many make the news available as soon as they have been received by satellite. The delay before used to protect the interests of print media is disappearing. Online services usually deliver news sooner than print media, radio and television.

'Clipping' gives an enormous advantage. Few important details escape your attention, even if you are unable to go online daily. The stories will stay in your mailbox until you have read them.

'Clipping' on the Internet

Reference.COM is a personalized conference postings delivery service that covers over 150,000 newsgroups (Usenet), mailing lists, and Web forums. You subscribe by submitting keywords that describe your interests. Postings that match your profiles (based on content, no matter which conferences they fall into) will be sent you periodically via email.

You can access the service at http://www.reference.com. For instructions on the email interface, send a message with the word "help" in the message body to the address email-queries@Reference.COM.

The search profiles can include operators like AND, OR, AND NOT, WHERE ORGANIZATION CONTAINS, WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS, and WHERE date <=>. You can adjust the frequency of delivery, the volume of articles, and the length of subscription.

One interesting application of the netnews service is to find which newsgroups may or may not be covering a subject area. When you have found the names, subscribe to those for direct inquiries, postings of queries, to converse with experts, etc.

Institute for Scientific Information (http://www.isinet.com) offers an alerting service built on a Current Contents database of over 7,000 journals, 2,000 books, and proceedings from the world's core research literature. ISI's Coverage includes publications in the fields of life sciences; agriculture, biology and environmental sciences; physical, chemical and earth sciences; clinical medicine; engineering, computing and technology; social and behavioral sciences; and the arts and humanities.

ZD Net offers a free, personalized news service at http://www.pview.com, tailored to include only your favorite topics.

PointCast Inc. (http://www.pointcast.com) provides free personalized news from Reuters. S&P Comstock's stock ticker, SportsTicker, AccuWeather, and Variety. Select to receive news on any of 35 industry topics.

For a modest fee, NewsPage  will send you a customized daily news report right to your electronic doorstep. The report will contain the day's headlines and news-briefs relevant to your needs. To get the full text of a selected article, connect to the shown Web page and read it.

Clarinet allows the use of software filters to display only messages that include certain keywords, and can subscribe to subsets of the wire service offerings. Users' newsreaders can do some individualized filtering as well.

Knight-Ridder's News Alert (http://www.newsalert.com/) provides fee-based filtered information from AFX (European business news), A.M. Best, Business Wire, Comline Business News (Japanese business news), Federal News Service, Futures World News, Global Information Network, Knight Ridder Financial, PR Newswire, Sports Ticker, US Newswire, and other sources. Email and fax delivery available.

World News Connection (WNC) is a foreign news alert service from the U.S. Government. For a moderate fee, you get access to time sensitive news gathered from thousands of foreign media sources, including political speeches, television programs and radio broadcasts, and articles from newspapers, periodicals, and books.

Contents include unclassified military, political, environmental and sociological, scientific and technical data and reports from around the world. All the material is translated into English. Regional categories covered include: Central Eurasia, East Asia, Near East & South Asia, China, East Europe, West Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa. Note: U.S. information is not included. URL: http://wnc.fedworld.gov/.

Some subscription plans include clipping. Define the type of information in which you are interested. On a daily basis, WNC will review all articles being added to the service, identify those meeting your profile, and email them to your mailbox.

CARL (Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, U.S.A.) offers a table of contents alert service. Users with an "UnCover profile" may create a list of journal titles in which they are interested. When the next issue of any of those titles is entered into UnCover, the table of contents will automatically be emailed to them. Ordering an article is as easy as replying to the email message. Information: uncover@carl.org, and at http://uncweb.carl.org/.

'Clipping' on CompuServe

CompuServe's Executive News Service (ENS) monitors over 8,000 stories daily from sources like Deutsche Press-Agentur (Germany), Kyodo News Service (Japan), ITAR/TASS (Russia), Xinhua News Agency (China), Pacific Rim News Service, The Washington Post, OTC News-Alert, Reuters Financial News Wire, Associated Press, UPI, Reuters World Report, IDG PR Service, Inter Press Service (IPS), Middle East News Network, European Community Report, and Dow Jones News Service.

One of them, Reuters, has 1,200 journalists in 120 bureaus all over the world. They write company news reports about revenues, profits, dividends, purchases of other companies, changes in management, and other important items for judging a company's results. They write regular opinions about Industry, Governments, Economics, Leading indicators, and Commerce.

Reuters also offers full-text stories from Financial Times and other leading European newspapers. Its Textline is a database with general and business news from some 2,000 publications in Western and Eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It includes Reuters' own news services, and translated abstracts of stories from some 17 languages. The database reaches back more than 10 years and is updated at around one million articles per year. (Textline is also available on Nexis, Data-Star, Clarinet, and Dialog.)

The IDG PR Service distributes high-tech related news gathered by the staffs of IDG's magazines. The InterPress Service covers Third World countries. The Middle East News Network integrates the contents of 28 information sources covering this region of Asia.

The Executive News Service lets you define up to three 'clipping folders'. Supply 'key phrases' that define your interests. These key phrases will be used for searching stories as they are sent. Hits will be 'clipped' and held in a folder for you to review at your convenience. When creating a clipping folder, you set an expiration date and specify how many days a clipped story is to be held.

To browse the contents of a folder, select it from the menu. Stories can be listed by headlines or leads. Select those you want to read, forward to others as email, or copy to another folder. Delete those that you do not need.

Defining key phrases is simple. The important thing is not to get too much, nor too little. General phrases will give many unwanted stories while too narrow phrases will cause you to miss pertinent stories. Example:

The phrase APPLE COMPUTERS will only clip stories that have the words APPLE and COMPUTERS next to each other. This may be too narrow. Specifying just APPLE or just COMPUTERS would be too broad. Entering APPLE + COMPUTERS is a better phrase since the words can appear anywhere in the story, and not necessarily next to each other.

ENS carries an hourly surcharge over base connect rates.

Other clipping services

Dow Jones' Interactive has a comprehensive clipping service for business users. Sources include Financial Times' international business reports - grouped within primary industry segments.

Filtering may also be used when retrieving news through QMail gateways on BBSes. For example, I use the 1stReader program for communications with a Norwegian PCBoard BBS that carries hundreds of newsgroups and mailing lists from Usenet, Internet, BITNET, and other networks. By having 1stReader upload a list of keywords through the BBS' QMail door, all new messages containing these words or phrases from given conferences will be selectively retrieved, compressed, and downloaded. A powerful feature!

There are also clipping offerings on a host of other free and commercial services.

When clipping is impossible

Many services do not offer clipping. On these, you can use various methods of regular, selective reading.

Many conferencing systems let you select messages to read by keywords.

BIX Keyword Indexer lets you search public conferences after a key word or phrase and reports hits. Then it offers you to review (or retrieve) messages of interest.

CompuServe's forums have efficient 'read selective' and 'quick scan' commands. Another trick is to limit your reading to specific message sections.

The high forum message volume is a special problem on this service. Old messages are regularly deleted to make room for new ones. (Often called "scroll rate.") Some popular forums do not keep messages for more than a couple of days before letting them go. You must visit often to get all new information.

Many bulletin boards can be told to store unread messages about given topics in a compressed transportation file. This file can then be retrieved at high speed. Special communication programs (often called offline readers) and commands are available to automate this completely.

Powerful scripts and offline reader programs  can do automatic selection of news stories based on the occurrence of keywords (for example, a company name) in headlines or the messages' text.

Subscription services

It is useful to dig, dig, and dig for occurrences of the same search words, but digging is not enough. Unless you periodically scan "the horizon," you risk missing new trends, viewpoints and other important information.

It can be difficult to find good sources of information that suits your needs. One trick is to watch the reports from your clipping services. Over time, you may discover that some sources bring more interesting stories than others. Take a closer look at these. Consider browsing their full index of stories regularly.

If your company plans exportation to countries in Asia, check out MARKET: ASIA PACIFIC on Brainwave for NewsNet. The newsletter is published monthly by W-Two Publications, Ltd., 202 The Commons, Suite 401, Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. (phone: +1-607-277-0934). Annual print subscription rate: US$279.

The index itself may be a barometer of what goes on.

It is a good idea to visit Brainwave for NewsNet to gather intelligence. Review indexes of potentially interesting newsletters. Save them on your hard disk for future references. You never know when they may be of use.

The newsletters within computers and electronics bring forecasts of market trends, evaluation of hardware and software, prices, information about IBM and other leading companies. You will find stories about technological developments of modems, robots, lasers, video players, graphics, and communications software.

The Management section contains experts' evaluation of the economic climate with forecasts, information about foreign producers for importers, tips and experiences on personal efficiency, management of smaller companies, and office automation.

Other sections are Advertising and Marketing, Aerospace and Aviation, Automotive, Biotechnology, Building and Construction, Chemical, Corporate Communications, Defense, Entertainment and Leisure, Education, Environment, Energy, Finance and Accounting, Food and Beverage, General Business, Insurance, Investment, Health and Hospitals, Law, Management, Manufacturing, Medicine, Office, Publishing and Broadcasting, Real Estate, Research and Development, Social Sciences, Telecommunications, Travel and Tourism, Transport and Shipping.

Several newsletters focus on specific geographical areas, like:

• THE EXPORTER (Published by Trade Data Reports. Monthly reports on the business of exporting. Functionally divided into operations, markets, training resources, and world trade information.)

• SALES PROSPECTOR (Monthly prospect research reports for sales representatives and business people interested in commercial, and institutional expansion and relocation activity. Grouped by geographic area in the United States and Canada.)

OPEC Daily Bulletin is a daily news report on oil prices, exploration, and consumption.

Other newsletters focus on technology intelligence:

Advanced Manufacturing Technology

Reports on desktop manufacturing, computer graphics, flexible automation, computer-integrated manufacturing, and other technological advances that help increase productivity.

High Tech Materials Alert

Reports on significant developments in high-performance materials, including alloys, metallic whiskers, ceramic and graphite fibers, and more. Concentrates on their fabrication, industrial applications, and potential markets.

Futuretech

Provides briefings on focused, strategic technologies that have been judged capable of making an impact on broad industrial fronts. Includes forecasts of marketable products and services resulting from the uncovered technology and its potential impact on industry segments. Advanced Coating & Surface Technology, Electronic Materials Technology News, Flame Retardancy News, High Tech Ceramics News, Innovator's Digest, Inside R&D, Japan Science Scan, New Technology Week, Optical Materials & Engineering News, Performance Materials, Surface Modification Technology News, Genetic Technology News, Battery & Ev Technology, and much more.