Where can you find information online? You probably already know, but here are some tips to give you the edge in finding stories.
Getting the News First
There are a couple of ways to get the news first, and it isn’t as difficult as you might think. When we say first we mean either be the first to get and write up a news story from a PR service, or, be the first to make the story popular.
There are a couple of different ways to do this, and we’ll cover each in turn, starting with the most user friendly:
Traditional Media Outlets and Other Blogs
There are 5 ways to read news online.
- Visit sites directly
- Utilize RSS Feeds through feed-readers, email, etc.
- Sign up for Newsletters
- Follow Twitter streams
- Google News Searches (which can now be added to RSS readers).
It is extremely useful to find the top 5 sites in your niche and follow their content closely. In the future, we would like to create a list of these for each blog, but in the meantime, just ask your blog’s editor.
Journals
Don’t forget what you learned in college (assuming you went or remember it 
. There is an incredible amount of information that doesn’t make it into public discourse available in journals. Here are some you may have forgotten about:
Also, don’t hesitate to look for trade publications or industry groups. While they may be inherently biased, they are clued into some of the best information you’ll find. Here are a few examples for Gas2.0 writers:
One of the best sources of information I ever found when writing for Gas 2.0 was a listserve of industry professionals.
PR Wires
PR Wires are distribution channels for press releases. Here are some examples:
You can also get PR feeds from large organizations:
Some of these services require registration, and aren’t the most user-friendly news sources in the world. The best way to use them is either their RSS feeds or filtered email alerts.
It takes some work to get the news here, but it’s entirely worth it if you get the breaking story of the day.
IM as an organization recieves a significant number of press releases on a daily basis. For more information on how these are distributed to writers, please see the Communication Tools page of the Training Blog.