Open Road - Info

I was going through my "need-to-review" list of e-mail-zines/newsletters and was trying to come up with a theme. I thought hey! (just like that) and figured that maybe there was a just a whack of Christmas newsletters out there, which might be nice given the season in the western hemisphere (or eastern hemisphere depending on your location and direction of view). No such luck, but then again I didn't look very hard. So I took a troll through the list again and figured I could do short takes on the international general-news newsletters that I subscribe to. So what you get this week are a few showcased publications and some resources that you can use to find such publications. Note: all these publications I'll be covering are in English.

Some of these publications I've subscribed to for quite awhile; others are very very new to me. I generally subscribe to newsletter updates from news sites if I visit their site regularly and want to save myself some time. Others I've seen listed various places and have subscribed to them on a lark. Some I've gone looking for specifically (e.g. I needed Thai news for a while to track some events) and have generally used some of the following sites to find them. One thing to keep in mind here, these sites don't list e-mail newsletters, they list publications which might happen to have an e-mail update of their news content.

News Resources

Worldwide News On-line - World Newspapers
http://www.worldwidenews.com/

This is a very extensive listing of publications and newspapers from dozens of countries around the world. From Andorra to China to Madagascar to Belize, each with multiple publication listings. Laid out in an easy to use, geographically-based frame set, with short descriptions beside each publication listing. In my opinion the best site of its kind that I've used.

The Daily News - Foreign Newspaper Links
http://www.middlebury.edu/~gferguso/newsd.shtml

Nicely done, clean, well presented site. Stocked full of countries (but avoiding US and Canada), sorted alphabetically and identified geographically. Some with publications listed with comments, other just listed. All of it done by a young guy living in Portland. Excellent source.

Yahoo: News & Media: Newspapers
http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Newspapers/

I couldn't put together a topic-based list of sites without a mention of Yahoo. Surprisingly not as extensive as the two listed above (given that Yahoo is supposed to list almost everything). As a bonus though the site does have an extensive listing of Web-based newspaper/publication indexes, quite probably where I originally found the two above.

News Central
http://www.all-links.com/newscentral/

This site boasts 3500 newspapers indexed and proven to be a decent find, though over 1100 of the publications listed are US based. If you're looking for something in particular, this site is a decent addition to your list.

NewsDirectory.com
http://www.newsdirectory.com/

Comes in on a tie with Worldwide News On-line. Very extensive site, with excellent organization. Browse for publications by country or topic categories. It labels itself as the "Guide to English-Language Media Online", which is great if you're looking for English publications (which I do given my limited non-English reading skills).

Below are some news e-mail newsletters that I may or may not endorse, but have found to be decently informative. Also note that not all of them are derived from newspapers, some are sent from magazines, radio, TV and government (whoops big brother) groups.

• The Economist Newsletters - the politics newsletter covers international news in short bites.
  
• Broadcasting Corporation of Belize - News Summary - daily mailer covering news from Belize.

Subscription Instructions: Visit http://www.cbcnews.cbc.ca/digest.html

WWW location:
http://cbcnews.cbc.ca/

Cost: free

Subscription Instructions: Visit http://www.pbs.org/newshour/select-sign.html

WWW location:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour

Cost: free

Subscription Instructions: Visit http://www.bangkokpost.net/misc/reviews.html

WWW location:
http://www.bangkokpost.net/

Cost: free

Subscription Instructions: Visit http://store.webconcept.net/albaniannews/

WWW location:
http://store.webconcept.net/albaniannews/

Cost: free

Subscription Instructions: Visit http://subscribe.news.com.au/form/

WWW location:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

Cost: free