News readers: Free, immediate and customized resource
To understand what a news reader is, it helps to know what a news reader was.
Back in the day, a news reader was a person who read a mountain of newspapers, magazines and journals on behalf of a client, clipped out relevant articles, and circulated the articles to those who needed to keep up with developments in a particular subject area. Sometimes this was done by an in-house person. (In fact, "news reader" was my first job out of college in support of more than 100 individuals at the League of Women Voters National Headquarters in Washington,D.C.) Sometimes news reading was done (for a hefty fee) by a PR firm or a clipping service.
By the time the article was written, printed and distributed by the publisher, and then read, clipped and circulated by a human news reader, the news could be many months old.
Times and tools have changed -- for the better.
Today, a news reader (or aggregator) is an Internet or desktop application that continuously searches the Internet (including blogs and other social media) for breaking news about a particular person, law firm, industry or subject area. It automatically collects all of this information in one place. It is a free, immediate and customized collection of the news and conversation essential to the success of any firm or professional services provider.
You can use a news reader to subscribe to the RSS feeds of resources like newspapers, blogs or courts. You can also use a news reader to subscribe to saved searches for certain keywords.
You can save a search, for example, for your law firm's name. If this name appears in the online version of a newspaper, magazine or journal; in a blog or comments to a blog; in a Twitter post; on a social network; or in RSS-enhanced content posted to any Web site (your own or others), that information will show up immediately in your reader -- where you can use it to support your daily professional and business decisions. Searches can also be created for individuals, clients, cases, competitors, industries and subject areas.
There are a variety of news readers out there. In the past, I have used Bloglines. Currently, I am using Google Reader. For a good tutorial on how to set up and use news readers, check out a recent Webinar presented by Kevin O'Keefe and the good folks at Lexblog.
