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HeadlineSpot is a top news source

March 2001

Just what we need&emdash;another online source for news. That was my thought when I received a postcard in the mail advertising a new site called HeadlineSpot. But I thought that I'd give it a try. And I came away impressed and with yet another thought: this is the best news source online.

The Internet is unwieldy, of course, and some of the best sites help to organize it for you. That's HeadlineSpot. It doesn't offer any content of its own, but offers you, in a single, at-a-glance page, all the news resources you would ever need.

The site is extremely well organized and gives you access from every angle. First, it lets you access news by region, whether local, state, national, or international. If you want to know the news in Turkey, select that and gain access to all the top news sources in that country. Or try the Iowa link to see many of the major Iowa news sources online, including the Ottumwa Courier, Fairfield Ledger, Burlington Hawk Eye, the Iowan magazine, and more.

Second, the HeadlineSpot home page also gives you at-a-glance access to news by media type. These include the top online news organizations, the wire services, television, newspapers, columnists, international newspapers, magazines, and radio. For example, magazine links include Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Radio links include National Public Radio. Of course, you can click on any category and see a more extensive list, but I like the way they identify the top sources and display them in the at-a-glance home page.

Third, you can access the news by subject, again with an at-a-glance listing of top resources in each area. The subjects include weather, finance, sports, technology, politics, business, industry, travel, entertainment, science, health, and education. For example, the sports topic includes links to CNN/SI, ESPN, Fox Sports, and CBS Sportsline. For all the subjects, you can click on a link that takes you to the top headlines.

In addition to these three main areas, the home page has range of additional links to fun stuff, resources, tools, opinion, good news, humor, offbeat news, lists of most popular (books, movies, etc.), and other lists, such as Pulitzer winners for last year.

It's an impressive site, and I was even more impressed when I realized that it's just one of over a dozen sites that comprise the StartSpot Network. There are also sites related to books, movies, employment, food, genealogy, giving, government, homework, libraries, museums, people, shopping, and travel.

According to the home page for the StartSpot Network, their editorial team carefully evaluates and selects the best, most relevant, and most interesting online resources on the web for a particular topic.

© 2001 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D.

E-mail Jim Karpen