The Internet has not killed off print; indeed, it probably has enhanced and absorbed traditional media.  The first step toward becoming a savvy newshound is to get an aggregator, which will gather headlines and links to news stories in one place.  They are on Yahoo!'s Full Coverage news area which searches for particular stories or scans news categories for relevant news to your search criteria.  Dig further, and Yahoo! will suggest related articles and other sources, often filled with rich multimedia links.  Although Yahoo! offers a solid foundation and introduction to news aggregation sites, its layout requires extensive drilling to get to unfiltered news stories.

First Headlines has a simple interface that will place headlines for each category on a single page alongside general topic headings.  This great resource indexes 300 newspapers and wire services.  First Headlines provides such features as breaking news buttons and the ability to view news by state.  Unfortunately, the problem with these sites is that they will expire quickly; and you might just lose that important link if you wait too long.

News depots not only gather information but also will store it for you.  The best of the news depots is Northern Light Current News Search which has a free, searchable two-week archive that covers 56 news services worldwide.  The best part of this site lies in the Northern Light Special Collection which costs $1 to $4 per article and archives thousands of courses dating back about ten years, including news, books, journals, and various other nonnews sources.

News LIbrary searches the archives of 65 newspapers from the U.S. and Canada and charges $1.95 per article.  Unfortunately, News Library has no scannable headlines but does feature archives dating further back than Northern Light Special Collection.  Both Northern Light and News Library will let you view abstracts before viewing the actual article.

If you are too busy to go to these sites and daily dig into the archives, then you might want to select a personalized, daily Web crawler which will send results straight to your email box.  Individual.com is one example, and InfoBeat takes this one step further; you can receive its contents only by email.  These services will allow you to determine your preferences for what type of mail you might want, but aren't for looking for specific articles.

Excite's News Tracker will let you log in to see stories that the service determines you might like.  It uses initial profiling and your ratings of stories to learn your preferences.  This is a good introduction to news, but many of us will always worry that there is pertinent news out there that we might be interested in but the news service just does not seem to think we might like.

The opinion pages are another good source of news - and the opinions of many thoughtful people toward this news.  Opinion Pages is an indexing of about 600 op-ed pages from the English-speaking newspapers around the world.  It is a top-notch resource for the conventional wisdom of the day.

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