Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

7.23. Where on the Internet can I find national and world news?

There is a wide variety of sources. Three examples follow.

Voice of America News

The Voice of America's international News and English Broadcasts radio newswire is available via anonymous FTP and the Internet Gopher, along with a variety of other information from VOA and Worldnet Television.

The News and English Broadcasts wire service includes the texts, in English, of radio reports prepared by VOA staff correspondents, contract news reporters, and feature and documentary writers. The wire provides a comprehensive daily report of news events worldwide. It is one of the core news products of the Voice of America, and is used as the basis for much of VOA's programming in all languages. The public Internet server is updated within a few minutes after each report is issued by the VOA central news department; a seven-day archive of the wire is available on the public server.

Selected VOA and Worldnet program schedules, shortwave radio frequency and satellite downlink information, public announcements from the Voice of America and Worldnet, and technical documents on international radio and television broadcasting are also available on the public Internet server.

All the materials on the server are available by anonymous FTP and the Internet Gopher. Schedules and other general information materials may also be requested via electronic mail; the News and English Broadcasts newswire is not available via e-mail because its contents change so rapidly.

The Voice of America and Worldnet are, respectively, the international radio and television networks of the United States Information Agency. They operate out of headquarters in Washington, D.C. VOA has news bureaus in many major world cities.

You can access the VOA archives via anonymous FTP to ftp.voa.gov or by Gophering to gopher.voa.gov, port 70. For more information, send e-mail to info@voa.gov. To request instructions on how to use the e-mail server, send a message with the contents "send help" to the preceding address.

To request an index of available files, send a message with the contents "send index" to the preceding address.

ClariNet

ClariNet offers what its designers call an electronic newspaper, broken down into categories by specific topics. If your Usenet provider subscribes to the service, you'll be able to read news from the Associated Press and Reuters newswires as well as a variety of syndicated news and analysis columns. (You can even see the Dilbert comic strip. Nifty!)

You'll definitely want to subscribe to the "top" news groups in any categories you're interested in tracking. clari.news.top covers top U.S.-related news, whereas the popular clari.news.top.world group focuses on international stories. Sports fans also read the group clari.sports.top, whereas business readers want clari.biz.top. Too much information? Try clari.news.briefs, offering short summaries of the current top news.

You can get subscription information on ClariNet by sending e-mail to info@clarinet.com, browsing ftp.clarinet.com, or phoning (800) USE-NETS or (408) 296-0366.

PeaceNet World News Service

The PeaceNet World News Service (PWN) is a daily newspaper of world news delivered to you through electronic mail. Each day a digest of news stories is sent, and subscribers can choose among a variety of different issue- and regional-oriented digests, too.

PWN features important international news about government, politics, the environment, human rights, development, the United Nations, and the work of nongovernment organizations.

To learn more about PWN, you can send an e-mail message to pwn-info@igc.apc.org, and for more general information about PeaceNet itself, send a message to peacenet-info@igc.apc.org.

Table of Contents | Previous Section | Next Section