We no longer subscribe to World News Digest from Facts on File.
Tag: World News Digest
Facts on File Is Now Called World News Digest
Recently, the company that owns Facts on File had rebranded that product as “World News Digest.” We’ve updated the listing for that database to “World News Digest (Facts on File)” and moved it to the W-Z page of the alphabetical databases list. We’ve also added a “see reference” on the E-F page that says “Facts on File is now called World News Digest” and offers a link over to the W-Z page. This pointer will remain in place until the end of the summer.
New Look and Name for Facts on File
By the end of the summer, Facts on File will launch the World News Digest database on a new platform. You can preview by that new interface from a link provided at the top of the current interface:
Over the course of several changes to the interface, Facts on File has been making the “World News Digest” part of the name more prominent and the “Facts on File” part less so, as can be seen in this screenshot of the new platform:
With this in mind, we’ll be changing the listing for this database from “Facts on File” to “World News Digest” late next week.
Living Stories Project for News
Today, Google Labs, the Washington Post, and the New York Times launched an experimental service called Living Stories that does some interesting things to present news stories in a way that makes them more webby (i.e., content that is designed to be “of the web” instead of just “on the web.”) It offers these features:
- Each news topic gets its own URL: health reform, climate change, Afghanistan, etc. Google explains that this allows you to “quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load.”
- Each topic has a summary at the top and sections that will show you the latest news, key events, who the players are, images, videos, etc.
- If you create a Google Account (if you’ve got a Gmail account or a Google Calendar or a Blogger login, then you have a Google Account already) and use that to log in to the Living Stories page, then the service will remember what stories you’ve already seen on a given news topic and will highlight any new ones that have been added since you last visited. Another way to be notified of new developments for a particular topic is to set up an email alert or subscribe to an RSS feed.
This might be a useful complement to databases like Facts on File and CQ Researcher, particularly for students who are trying to get background information on a developing news story.
Additional coverage of this project:
Kirkpatrick, Marshall. “Beyond the Web Page: Google, NY Times, and Washington Post Launch News Experiment. ReadWriteWeb, 8 December 2009. Web.
Singh, Neha and Josh Cohen. “Exploring a New, More Dynamic Way of Reading News with Living Stories.” Official Google Blog, 8 December 2009. Web.
Researching Current Events
Several sections of COM1010 will be working on current event topics for their first informative speech. Before I met with these classes, I did some brainstorming about sources with Barbara and Randy. Here are some databases and web sites we recommend.
For background, use CQ Researcher or the Facts on File World News Digest.
CQ Researcher has changed its interface and it is now better in most cases to search rather than browse by topic. Their bibliographies are good for identifying research groups and government agencies.
Facts on File is especially good for foreign news summaries or country-focused issues. Search results can be filtered for “Analysis & Background” which includes editorials and primary documents like transcripts and congressional reports.
For News, we found C-SPAN has some good research features. They have “Featured Topics” pages and if you scroll down past the video and news, you will see links to government resources, legislation, House and Senate committees, and public interest groups.
For Polls and Surveys, the web site of Publicagenda.org includes “Issue Guides” and “Research Studies” (a little hidden in the tabs at the top of the page), both topical approaches to current issues.
For news, reports, and links to government agencies, USA.gov is a good place to start. Searches can be filtered by topic, agency or source, or you can just filter for sources with statistics. If you haven’t used this web site lately, it is worth another look.
For reports from think tanks and independent research organizations, we used PolicyFile, one of our databases, and a web site called Policyarchive.org.