Reuters news agency started in the 1850s, when entrepreneur Julius Reuter used carrier pigeons to inform Berlin investors of events on the Paris bourse. Later, Reuter connected
London and Europe by telegraph. Important news from North America was tossed off approaching ships in canisters near Cork, Ireland, to be fetched by small boats and transmitted across the continent.

Nowadays, many advisors — and their clients — like to be on top of events and receive important news minutes or even seconds after it happens. Here are some Web sites that will e-mail an alert as soon as an important event occurs.


CBC News alerts
www.cbc.ca

Our venerable Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is widely known for its radio and television programming, but it has also been making strides on the Internet in the past few years. Its online news coverage expands by the week, and is improving measurably, as well. The slowness, numerous typographical errors and brevity that were common not long ago have been replaced by speed and better writing.

The link for the latest general news is at the top on the left-hand side of the home page, with business news just beneath it. There is also a running scroll of breaking news on the centre of the page.

At the time of writing the CBC was on strike so various services were not available.
Normally, however, you can subscribe to the news alerts e-mail service by going to the bottom left-hand side of the home page. The service is free and it only takes a few minutes to register.

Apart from alerts, there are an array of e-mail services, including daily news digests as well as sports and arts news. You can also subscribe to regional news for any provinces you choose to receive a daily digest of more local news. As well, there are e-mail newsletters covering a raft of both radio and TV programming.

The news alerts are usually one-sentence bulletins that appear in your e-mail within moments of a major event. A hyperlink is included that, once clicked, will bring you to the CBC site for further coverage.


ABC News alerts
www.abcnews.com

Whether or not you are a fan of U.S. television network news, the simple fact is the ABC
News Web site generates the fastest news alerts I have found to date. The newsroom, which was anchored for decades by the late Canadian journalist Peter Jennings, is almost always the first to zap a bulletin into your e-mail box.

The home page of the site is similar to that of the CBC, with headers running down the left-hand side for general news, business and other topics. You can sign up for the e-mail services by scrolling further down the same column to “ABC news services.” You will be required to complete a one-time subscriber form for the free services.

As well as breaking news, there are almost 20 other newsletters you can have sent to you by e-mail. They include recaps of each day’s big news, MoneyScope business headlines, investigative reports, political news and columns, and various weekly entertainment letters.


BBC News alerts
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/email/
breakingnews

Type this long Internet address just one time and save yourself a lot of searching on the massive British Broadcasting Corp. family of Web sites.

The address will bring you directly to the subscriber page of BBC World News, which is free and requires you to provide a bit of information about yourself. In addition to vital news bulletins, you can custom-design a daily BBC e-mail newsletter. There are about 20 topics; you simply check the boxes you want. Choices range from top stories and world business to global regions, such as Asia-Pacific or Europe, as well as science, technology, health and entertainment.


Cable News Network alerts
www.cnn.com

CNN is usually the fastest gun for live television coverage of breaking news, but it is a tad slower when it shoots the same information out into cyberspace. The printed word is definitely a secondary priority for the 25-year-old news wunderkind. Almost without exception, CNN news alerts are the last to arrive in your e-mail compared with the other
Web sites reviewed in this column. The delays are often 10 or 20 minutes, and even longer, which is little help to an advisor who may want to react immediately to an important or unexpected event.

@page_break@On the plus side, however, CNN’s Web site often seems to be quite speedy when it comes to filling in the details of breaking news. The other services, while quick to send the vital bulletin or an initial paragraph or two, often take their sweet time filing a longer story. Readers may find, as I do, that they gravitate to the CNN site or the TV network for extended coverage once one of the other Web sites has signalled that something big has happened.

The CNN site’s home page is almost identical to the others, with news categories running down the left-hand side. Similarly, the e-mail services subscription area is farther down on the left-hand side.

Of the sites reviewed, the CNN site is the only one that allows you to customize your news alerts based on keywords. You may create a list of up to 30 different words, and
CNN will e-mail you the moment it posts on its site any stories that include the keyword. It is a handy service, enabling you to track various companies or business and political events with little effort. IE

If you have Web sites to share with IE readers, contact Glenn Flanagan at gflanagan@sympatico.ca.