I like the way Professor Jeff South of Virginia Commonwealth University put it at the Journalism Interactive Conference today: “sign up for news to come to you.” I’ve long suggested professionals and students should subscribe to e-releases from government agencies and set up alerts on search engines. But I hadn’t ever pitched it as well as he did – “let the news come to you.”
You might want to subscribe with a separate email from your main one, or set up your email program to shuttle these to a special folder, where you can peruse them regularly. I know they are too much to come into the email I use most often – I get too much already.
Here’s a link to setting up alerts on Google. You put in keywords and Google emails you updates when those words appear on the web or in news. You can customize the alert for frequency or type of sites searched. Yahoo! is similar and will send the results to email, IM, pager or cell phone.
Please share below some of the alerts or electronic news releases that have helped your reporting. I could use some more examples in my teaching.