Jinfo: Comparative Report on News Products

Comparative Report on News Products
Jinfo Blog

17th December 2012

Abstract

FreePint regularly reviews news content products and news aggregators. We then conduct an analysis of those reviews on an annual basis, to demonstrate how the different providers line up with one another across such criteria as source coverage, search capabilities, reporting and outputs and special features.

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News content is consistently of interest to FreePint Subscribers, regardless of their industry, organisation size or content budget. Over the course of a year, we conduct in-depth reviews of many of the most common products for news delivery. At the end of the year, we then compare each of those products across the criteria we assign our researchers, including:

Sources
Search functions
Ease of use
Reporting formats, alerts and outputs
Special features and functions

In 2012, FreePint published the following product reviews:

NewsEdge.com (March 2012)
Newsdesk (May 2012)
FirstRain (September 2012)
Big Free Three for News (September 2012)
Factiva.com (December 2012)

These reports form the basis for this year’s comparative analysis of their features. Last year’s analysis also included Nexis UK and Eureka.ca, but did not include the Big Free Three. We hope to update our reviews of all news products our customers indicate are important to them in 2013.

Why Focus on News?

News content is a meaningful topic of study for a number of reasons. First, it is a content category that is relevant to the entire FreePint Subscriber base. All organisations acquire and use news content for business management, development and decision-making. Even an organisation not using one or more of the specific products covered in the project will find useful information on common features, functions and overall trends to watch for in the delivery of news.

Second, we at FreePint see the news category as a useful marker for what’s emerging in content products overall. Many developments that first take hold in the news category – such as workflow specialisation, mobile access and increased tension within an organisation around fee vs. free sources – soon make their way into other content categories. By tracking developments in the news category year after year, we can also extrapolate to developments we can expect to see in other areas as well.

More Analysis and Resources on News

In addition to the full reviews of the products listed in this report, you can get more analysis on organisional news needs and preferences in the upcoming report of our annual survey, due to be published in December 2012.

FreePint Subscribers can also access last year’s survey results here.

If news content is an area of interest, visit the News category of FreePint Articles. As with all categories, the News category has an RSS feed you can subscribe to, for notification when new articles are added.

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