Chapter 9: Your electronic daily news

===================================== Read national and global news before they are announced by the traditional media. Get those interesting background facts. Read special interest news stories that seldom appear in print. Sure, you read newspapers, watch TV, and listen to radio. But did you know how limited their stories are? Traditional news media just give you a small part of the news. Their editors are not concerned about YOUR particular interests. They serve a large group of readers, viewers or listeners with different interests in mind. Go online to discover the difference. The online news has an enormous width and depth. Besides "popular" news, you will find stories that few editors bother to print. This may give you better insight in current developments, and in as much details as you can take. Most commercial online services offer news. Most of their stories come from large news agencies and newspapers. You can also read and search articles from magazines, newsletters and other special publications. The online users' ability to search today and yesterday's news makes these offerings particularly useful. The cost of reading a given news item varies by online service. What will set you back 20 cents on one service, will cost you two dollars on another. It may be many times more expensive (or cheap) to read the same article from the same news provider on another online service. So, professional online users compare prices. National news ------------- In Norway, we have long been able to read local language news from print media like Aftenposten, Dagens Naeringsliv, Kapital, and news wires from NTB and other local sources. Similarly, local language news is available online in most countries. The cost of reading local news on national online services tends to be more expensive than on major global online services. As competition among global news providers increases, however, this is bound to change. International news ------------------ "The Global Village" is an old idea in the online world. News from most parts of the world has long been globally available. A while ago, a well-known Norwegian industrialist visited my office. I showed off online searching in NewsNet newsletters and stumbled over a story about his company. "Incredible!" he said. "We haven't even told our Norwegian employees about this yet." Often, American online services give news from other countries earlier you can get it on online services from these countries. Besides, the stories will be in English. | In 1991, the United States had 56 percent of the world's online | | databases (Source: the research company IQ, September 1991). | Sure, most Norwegians prefer to read news in Norwegian. The Japanese want news in their language, and the French in French. If they can get the news earlier than their competitors, however, most are willing to read English. Few master many languages. Unless you live in a country where they talk Arabic, Chinese or French, chances are that you cannot read news in these languages. English, however, is a popular second choice in many countries, and it has become the unofficial language of the online world. Another thing is that reading local language news is risky. Translators often make mistakes. One reason is time pressure, another poor knowledge of the source language. The risk of inaccuracies increases when a story, for example initially translated from Spanish into English, then are being translated into a third language. Avoid news that has been translated more than once. If not, you may experience something like this: On September 19, 1991, Norwegian TV brought news from Moscow. They told that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had a heart attack. The online report from Associated Press, which arrived 7.5 hours earlier, talked about "a minor heart attack" with the following additional explanation: "In Russian, the phrase 'heart attack' has a broader meaning than in English. It is commonly used to refer to a range of ailments from chest pains to actual heart failure." Your "personal online daily newspaper" will often give you the news faster and more correctly than traditional print media. Some news is only made available in electronic form. Seven minutes in 1991 --------------------- On September 19, I called CompuServe to read news and gather information about online news sources. According to my log, I connected through Infonet in Oslo (see