State Newslines
A couple of years ago I talked about Google Alerts. (http://byteoftheweek.wordpress.com/2005/06/15/another-look-at-google/) In short, you tell Google to track certain terms and they send you an email when they add web sites that contain those terms to their database. I love it for tracking rural broadband issues. (I track that kind of thing: http://www.blandinonbroadband.com/.)
I wished that there was a resource where I could track terms only on Minnesota pages or Minnesota news sources. Magic presto – I got an email from Mark in West Virginia on a new service that does just that.
State Newslines (https://www.statenewslines.com) tracks news sources by state. They have free and premium services. I know it’s not like me but I use their premium services so I’ll start by talking about them.
For a fee, I can have State Newslines keep track of words and phrases as they appear on Minnesota news publications. I think monitor about 50 sources. I have them track [broadband and internet]. Each morning I get an email with any articles that contain one of those terms. It’s like a super focused Google Alert and it saves me time and gives me a heads up on articles I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Also I can search Minnesota-only publications at any time.
For free, I can check out the headlines from MN papers on one page and I can do a keyword search of Minnesota-only publications.
Thank you Ann for the kind words about our media monitoring service. We are excited about 2009 with major improvements coming in the near future to make it even easier to use. Anyone that needs to track news in their state can try it for free by going to http://www.statenewslines.com. Enjoy!