Catch Breaking News Using These Tips

If you're a news hound and have a hankering for finding and reporting breaking news, use the following tips to help you learn where to look:

Check Most-Recent Online News Reports
Getting the jump on recent news reports may give you the edge to report on them for Associated Content well before plenty of other news outlets may have reported on the same topic. Here's how to find reports published mere minutes ago:

1 - Get the latest from Google News by setting up a search sorted by date in Google News based on the letter "a" by bookmarking this URL:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=a&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d

Since nearly every article contains the letter a, this will give you a list of the most recent news, starting with stuff published as early as 0 minutes ago by news wire services like Associated Press, Reuters, including national and local newspapers and others.

2 - Do the same with Yahoo and get the latest from Yahoo News by setting up a search sorted by date in Yahoo News based on the letter "a" by bookmarking this URL:

http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news?ei=UTF-8&p=a&datesort=1&pstart=1&b=181&fr=sfp&pstart=1&b=1

3 - Set up an AOL news feed by selecting several national news category feeds to read such as the top national, ABC, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, CNN/U.S., Time Magazine, USATODAY.com news feeds or others in specific categories like business and finance, sports, entertainment, technology, politics and opinions, or humor and fun.

Bookmark this site and begin selecting the feeds you'd like to keep abreast of:
http://feeds.my.aol.com/index.jsp?url=http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/aol/HomePage.xml

Beside each of the stories is information about the last time the story was updated, so you'll get an idea of its age. Another great place to check is the AOL news page, as well the bottom of some AOL article pages, where they provide the reader with the most popular stories in the last 24 hours and 7 days, as well as strange-but-true news.

4 - Check the Blogosphere
Search the most recent blog postings or top tags and searches on Technorati.com to see what the blogs are writing about and reacting to. Technorati provides users with the most recent posts sorted by the last one updated.

5 - Check TMZ
If entertainment is your thing, check http://www.tmz.com/, a site that posts entertainment stories pretty often, usually several times per day.

Track Satellite Radio and TV Reports
XM radio has loads of great news stations of 24-hour news programs that provide regular and breaking-news coverage that you can also find via satellite TV:

121 - Fox News
122 - CNN
123 - CNN Headline News
124 - ABC News & Talk
125 - The Weather Channel
127 - CNBC
129 - Bloomberg Radio
130 - MSNBC
131 - BBC World News

I like to listen to these while driving around town with my MP3 player handy (which has a voice recorder that I use more often than the song playing feature) to capture quotes and breaking news that I can later write about.

Watch a Variety of TV Stations
While the above news stations and others are available via satellite TV as well, don't discount non-news programs. Even "non-news" programs can contain breaking news reports.

For example, I was watching The View real-time when Star Jones announced that she was quitting the show. If only I'd have been writing for Associated Content back then, I could've immediately written and published a report about the happenings and gotten the jump on plenty of other reporters.

Either way, this type of news is definitely the breaking, urgent type of stuff that web searchers will immediately seek out.

Predict Trends…
…by figuring out what will be tomorrow or next week's breaking news. If there's a sure-to-be much talked about movie or video game or some new technology coming out next week or next month that are privy to, especially if it hasn't been well-covered yet, by all means, go ahead and write about it.

Getting your piece in first before the cyberworld covers it to death is another way to get in on breaking news that not many folks have read about yet.