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This overdressed site has been prepared in connection with sections of English 288-9 on "Making the News," a subset of Expository Writing courses offered by the English Department and the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines of Cornell University. It is always in progress and inevitably, in part, outdated. Additions, deletions, and comments are welcomed by the Webster, and their authors will be acknowledged on this site.

Coverage and accessibility . All that can be said about the news and opinion sites linked in these pages is that they differ radically in volume, coverage, and relationship to the print or broadcast organs with which most are associated. Some few offer (nearly) full contents of their more print or broadcast counterparts. A few more are either independent on-line publications in their own right or stand-alone Web services or clearinghouses. Most are partial, typically offering selected stories and features from print or broadcase organs and indexing others. A few linked here are just "site samplers." Almost all of them want to sell you something.

Cost . "Information wants to be free," wrote John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Most providers of information have other ideas. Because the economics of the news business and the on-line world are both unstable and unpredictable, Web providers have veered from offering nearly everything for free and charging high rates for some or all content -- in many cases failing to make viable profits. "What has happened so far on the Internet has been a great giveaway of news content," write Leonard Downie, Jr. and Robert Kaiser in The News about the News (New York: Knopf, 2002). The largesse of news organizations, they say, "can't go on indefinitely." Most all resources listed here provide significant content for free or in exchange for registration, which typically costs nothing but may put users on mailing lists for current or future information products.

Although nothing can capture all this variety, we've tried to mark sources with a few symbols for accessibility and cost.

= available through C.U.L.'s e-reference collection

r = significant access for registration (free)

$ = charge for some or all contents (or: you may need to subscribe to the print version to gain full access to the site)

= particular value and/or interest here

Advice on recordkeeping. As you browse periodicals on the Web, it is an extremely good idea to bookmark particular stories in various media and retain them, suitably organized, in a "Bookmarks" or "Favorites" file -- or download them through the Save As command on your browser. Many news sources make contents available on a direct search (of an edition, of the site) for a limited time, then charge you for archival search and recovery. If you have downloaded a story (which by one construction of Fair Use doctrine it is your right as a scholar to do), you'll have it when it may not be freely available, or available at all. If you have bookmarked a story, the story may well be available to you through the specific link you have created even when it cannot otherwise be easily recovered.

Browsers. The sites linked here are best browsed with Netscape 4.08 or above or Internet Explorer 5, and with all the respect in the world for Netscape, IE is a stabler and more versatile tool.

Thanks are owed to various people for contributing, sometimes unknowingly, to these listings: Michael Engle of O/K/U Reference at Cornell University Library, Tim Sullivan of Court TV, Jami Carlacio, Jill Gillespie, Angela Naimou, Fritz Umbach, Megan Wesling, and the staff of the Academic Technology Center of Cornell Information Technologies.

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