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Getting The News August 2000 • Vol.8 Issue 8 |
 Magazines & News Articles Save Some Cash By Reading Magazines On AOL | ||
 Are you tired of magazines and newspapers cluttering up your living room waiting to be read? Are you worn out bundling up all your reading material to take to the recycling center? Is the cost of all those magazines and newspapers putting a crimp in your budget? Have you given up on the Prize Patrol ever visiting you? If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, AOL (America Online) just might have the answer. AOL lets you read magazines and newspapers online in the Newsstand area without having to subscribe to those magazines and newspapers. To help clear the clutter from your home, the process is paperless. Not only that, but AOL can search a number of news sources looking for stories that specifically interest you and deliver them to your e-mail account. You can also manually search for stories of interest. Since AOL is an international service, you might think that only national news is available. However, if you live in or near a midsize or large city, AOL is also able to provide a wide range of news and information of local interest.  The Newsstand AOL collects its reading material into one place for easy reading. This area is called the Newsstand. The quickest way to reach the Newsstand is using the Keyword: Newsstand. By collecting all this information into one location, AOL acts much like the many portals that dot the Internet landscape.
Many of the online magazines are not AOL-specific. Rather, selecting a magazine loads a browser and takes you to the magazine's Web site. When you find a site you like, you can, of course, bookmark it so you can access it even if it is no longer featured on the Newsstand. Since much of this information comes from various Web sites, it lacks consistency. Different magazines present the information using various designs. They also have different levels of information in varying degrees of quality. Some of the magazines will show you most of the articles that are in the published magazine, but many will not. Often, you will find only highlights, extracts, or older issues. Of course, in today's hurried world, condensed articles and highlights may be all you want. We were surprised to see that two of what many consider the best general interest online magazines (Salon.com and Slate.com) were not featured. Both of these magazines offer breaking news, in-depth analysis, and interesting features. Salon.com carries more articles and has racier content while Slate.com features more political coverage. As a bonus, since they are only online and are free, you always get their full contents. Both are daily magazines with a broad offering that changes every weekday. You can, of course, read these on AOL by using the built-in browser and going to their Web sites, http://www.salon.com and http://www.slate.com, respectively. Watching Television The News Publications window has a button on the right side for CBS news. This button loads a window where you can select from a list of the major stories being carried on the CBS nightly news. Clicking a link shows you a simulated newscast of that story. You hear the sound just as you would over television. A sound card and speakers are naturally required. The audio sounds fine even over a modem connection. Rather than showing full-motion video, which takes a lot of bandwidth and is therefore slow over a modem, AOL shows a series of slides that give you the main illustrations of the story but without movement. The video is small to save bandwidth and time and is shown in a small dialog box. While the approach is naturally a compromise, the effect is rather pleasing and more effective than the above description might suggest. News Profiles One of the most annoying aspects of getting your information in printed form is trying to sort through all the pages looking for stories that interest you. It would take 30 minutes or more to sort through a single magazine or newspaper looking for everything that interests you, not including the time to read it. Now, multiply that times all the publications to which you subscribe, and you will spend a lot of your scarce time looking for things that interest you. Many busy executives hire specialists that read all the publications and pull out the articles for them to read. This is called a clipping service. If you do not wish to hire a clipping service, why not let AOL do it for you? Not only is it free, it is accurate once you get it tuned up. AOL has a personal electronic agent that searches through a wide variety of news sources, including Associated Press and Business Wire, and pulls off the stories in which you are interested and delivers them directly to your mailbox. To set up the agent, use the Keyword: Newsprofiles to open the AOL News Profile window. This will walk you through a series of questions where you will specify phrases to search for, words or phrases to require in the articles, and words and phrases to exclude. You will also specify the sources you wish to have searched. You are really specifying a Boolean logic search, and it may take a few tries to get the search right. Each of the resulting articles, up to a daily limit of 50, is e-mailed to you. If a search isn't specific enough, you will get 50 articles every day. Once you create a specification, you can review the off-topic articles you receive to figure out ways to fine-tune your search criteria so you only get the articles you want. Since many people have multiple interests, AOL lets you create up five profiles per screen name, which means you could receive as many as 350 stories daily if you picked active topics. With AOL allowing up to seven screen names per account, even the most news-hungry users will be able to track all of the news topics that interest them. News profiles are useful for companies, celebrities, or politicians who wish to see everything written about themselves. They are also useful for researchers and activists who wish to stay current about a specific area. And a temporary profile is useful for tracking a breaking story, such as the recent activity regarding the I Love You virus. News profiles are not terribly useful for keeping track of broad topics, such as the stock market or politics, which generate a large number of stories in a wide variety of different areas. For these, you must specify your interests in much more focused subtopics using a limited number of keywords. For example, trying to track the presidential campaign using news profiles would quickly overwhelm your inbox but tracking the crime proposals of the candidates would be a perfect use of news profiles. AOL News AOL offers a complete news source for its members. To access this information, click the Top News button on the AOL Welcome screen. This brings up the AOL News area. If you are not currently at the Welcome screen, you can always use the Keyword: News to jump to the news area. The AOL News area has a row of buttons down the left side that you use to select the category of news you desire. There are 19 categories, including Local, News, Sports, Health, Entertainment, and Personal Finance. AOL calls these categories channels. You will, of course, find most of the news in the News channel. The right side of this dialog box shows a list of five or so big news stories. These are provided by two of the top news wire services, Associated Press and Reuters. These one-line items give you an instant summary of the news. If any of the stories interest you, you can click the summary to read the full story. Above this list, there's a single story that gets several lines of coverage and a photograph. At the top of the right side is a news ticker that cycles through a longer list of news and sports story briefs. You also can click any of these to read more about that story. All of these items are updated frequently during the day. Of course, the frequency of updates is a function of how much news is occurring and how fast it is developing. The center of this dialog box lists the various news subchannels that AOL offers. Currently, it offers U.S. And World, Business, Politics, Health, Entertainment, Family, and Life: The Lighter Side. Clicking any of these will bring up another dialog box for that specific news subchannel. These areas list the major stories within that category with slightly longer summaries. Again, you can click any story to get more information. While this sounds like a lot of information, and it is, you can quickly review all the headlines on the various channels. This gives you a quick overview of the day's events. You can then click the items that are of specific interest to you. Overall, it takes only a few minutes to stay well informed. Know More Imagine that you are riding home listening to the news on the radio, and you catch a brief mention of a topic that really piques your interest. How do you find out more? To help you search through all the news on AOL for specific stories, the AOL News area includes a Search button. This brings up a dialog box where you can search for stories containing specific keywords. To help you further narrow your search, you can search in any one of the following channels: Business, Corporate Announcements, Entertainment, Health, Sports, U.S. And World, and Photographs. For a broad search, there is an option to search all channels. This search engine allows the use of Boolean expressions similar to those used in the news profiles. This lets you construct complex queries that return exactly the information that interests you. Since it searches only news sources, you have the additional advantage of not having to wade through all the extraneous material that turns up in a typical search on a Web search engine. Local News For times when you're more interested in what's happening in your local area, AOL provides a wide variety of local news and other information for many major cities in a feature called Digital City. To reach the Digital City, click the Local button on the main Channels display. You can also select Local from the Channels menu on the toolbar. This opens a dialog box where you use a drop-down list to select the city in which you are interested. Once you have selected the city, AOL loads a screen specifically for that city. The main Digital City box is larger than the other news dialog boxes. It takes up most of the screen. One reason for this is the larger quantity of information presented in this dialog box. The main screen will give the local weather, as well as brief summaries of local news and gossip. The Digital City window contains several tabs. In addition to the main tab that is automatically loaded, there are tabs for Local Entertainment, Local Shopping, Local Gossip, Local Highlights, Visitors Information, News, and Sports. With all this city-specific information, Digital City functions much like a location-specific magazine. And not only is Digital City useful for residents, it is a great way for people who have moved to keep up with their hometown. It is also a great way for vacation planners to get information on attractions and weather for cities they are planning on visiting. Great Variety AOL offers a large variety of magazine and news content. Much of this content is available on the Internet for free without using AOL. However, AOL collects it together nicely in one location and ties it together with easy-to-use windows. AOL's e-mail delivery of news via its news profiles is especially useful.  by Ronny Richardson
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