Google News’s remarkable success (7 million readers, no editors) has helped many journalists realize that readers value a diverse array of news sources. To that end, CNET News.com has rolled out a set of new offerings that make staying on top of the latest technology headlines from around the Web much easier.
CNET News.com has always had a fairly enlighted view about linking to other sites; for years it’s had a section at the bottom of its homepage linking to about 10 stories on other websites. But those are generally not stories that overlap with ones CNET News.com has written.
Now CNET is going several steps further.
For starters, CNET has created a new section devoted to highlighting the best technology news coverage on the Web, News.com Extra. For each of the main stories of the moment, CNET lists several related headlines from other sites selected by editors, in addition to listing its own stories.
For example, a recent flock of headlines about Oracle’s antitrust court battle included stories from CNET, Business Week, eWeek, Reuters, and The Register (based in the UK).
A quick look at this site immediately shows the advantage over Google News in the quality of story selection, though Google News still wins when it comes to depth.
But it also becomes clear pretty quickly that on the main stories, this page offers a better experience than News.com’s own homepage, by offering readers News.com’s headlines along with others’ angles on the same story. Eventually, perhaps they’ll merge this page with their homepage and create the ideal tech news start page for their audience. It’d be pretty daring, though, for a news site to list competitors’ headlines right under its own, on its own homepage.
News.com Extra also has two other features worth noting: automated headline feeds for international, national, sports, business, and entertainment news; and a Weblog-like column called “Missing links” that highlights offbeat stories from around the Web.
CNET is also testing a new page called News Around the Web, which is much more similar to Google News in that it’s automated. It doesn’t attempt to pick the top stories, though, like Google News — it leaves that to the humans behind News.com Extra. Instead, it lets you see headlines by site, company or topic. The company and topic searches are really valuable — click on Apple and you’ll get a list of headlines and links from stories about Apple across the Web. Right now the beta page lists about 100 companies and 20 topics. These pages are great ways to keep on top of beats or companies you’re covering.
CNET also has e-mail alerts that will notify you when CNET publishes new stories about a particular company, topic, or keyword. It’s a free service, though you need to register.
Here are some previous columns about other alerts you might find useful:
What websites do you find handy for finding information? Have you used the Web recently for a story? Send me the website and the story and I may print them. E-mail me at: poynter (at) jondube.com
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