Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Finding breaking news for an intranet - Toronto / Canadian news

We try to keep our home intranet page fresh by including late-breaking news as I have time to add it. Someone recently asked me how I find this information; following is a quick list:

In addition to signing up for the usual Supreme Court of Canada and other government e-mail news, I also receive FlashMail from Pulse24.com ("CP24", the all-news TV station from CHUM City). They send out e-mail as news is breaking as well as headlines for the day's upcoming newscast.

I also listen to the news throughout the day, either the audio from CP24 (available from the website, the left toolbar) OR CBC News, livestream from their website. I listen to Toronto news, but there is news available for all Canadian regions.

Another great source is to receive press releases from Canada Newswire's Portfolio service, free with registration. You can target specific releases or, my preference, receive the Media Daybook each morning. This tells of upcoming press conferences in the day. This is particularly useful for indicating when a government department is going to be releasing big news that day so you can listen for it. You can also view the Media Daybook directly on the website at http://www.newswire.ca/en/daybook/index.cgi.

If nothing of interest to the firm is available from these sources, I troll around various pages including Law Society of Upper Canada, Bar Association pages and the like.

Unfortunately none of this is in RSS (that I have noticed), so I do not put live feeds directly onto our intranet. I pick and choose and manually update our "Home" and "What's New" pages.

If you know of another source for this type of business/legal/general interest information, let me know. I'd love to add to my little collection of sources.

Cheers,
Connie

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