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Saving Yourself from TV News with Google News

We have more ways of receiving news than ever before, online and offline. Nearly every print publication runs an online edition, and a new breed of amateur journalists publishing Weblogs adds a powerful new voice to professional news reporting and commentary. In addition, the mechanics of news distribution have evolved rapidly over the last ten years. New, free tools such as RSS feed aggregation and podcast downloading have made it ever easier to receive a highly customized selection of news sources onto your screen (and into your ears). Don’t worry if you aren’t aware of RSS or podcasts; you don’t need to know them.

Google News is a virtual newsstand of astounding scope. It was revolutionary when first introduced, and now, if not as novel, it continues to be as important in the areas in which it specializes. Google News is a completely automated search engine for daily news. That automation sets it apart from a major competitor for your eyeballs: Yahoo! News, which uses a combination of news crawlers and human editors. (Google News is not 100 percent automated, because humans can add sources to the engine. But the selection of stories and the arrangement of those stories on the Google News site are accomplished entirely by software.)