NewsRack: A tool for personalized news monitoring
NewsRack is a tool/service for classifying, filing, and long-term archiving of news. It enables individuals to track news and archive them on the web in easily accessible news categories. Users do this by defining vocabularies and writing filtering rules which are used to select relevant articles from news sources.
Background
Several NGOs, researchers, journalists, individuals actively monitor newspapers to track issues that they work on or are interested in. This can be a time-consuming and laborious process and many organizations have a hard time keeping up. This is very much the case in India. However, using web versions of newspapers and magazines, news monitoring can be made easier. In this context, the broad goal of NewsRack is to aid the task of news monitoring for organizations and researchers.
Features
- Personalized � define categories and organize them however you want, monitor only the sources you want
- Archived for the long-term � news archived in your categories and stay there as long as you want them
- Multilingual � can track news in Hindi, Kannada, English, and other languages simultaneously
- Media coverage analysis � possible to do media coverage analysis by defining appropriate filtering rules
- Output RSS feeds � output RSS feeds for every category
Additionally, since the gathered news is made public, a much wider section of the public can benefit from the efforts of existing users without having to invest that same effort.
Some of the news sources being tracked
Hindu, Deccan Herald, Indian Express, New Indian Express, Times of India, Economic Times, Hindu Business Line, Hindustan Times, The Statesman, The Telegraph, Navhind Times, Assam Tribune, Kangla Online, E-pao Manipur, India Together, Rediff on the Net, Sify News, New Kerala Online, NDTV, CNN IBN, etc.
Sample topics being tracked
Climate Change, Mining, Infant Mortality, Environmental Clearance, Dams, Energy, Organic Agriculture, Land Acquisition, Urban Planning, Farmer Suicides, Water, ADB, ....
Websites using NewsRack's output
Environment Support Group, India Water Portal, Action for Autism, Friends of River Narmada, Center for Civil Society, CACIM, Action 2007, Peoples Forum Against the ADB
Awards, Testimonials, Media coverage
- NewsRack was one of the receipients of the Manthan Award in the e-News category in August 2006.
- "I've been just showing Newsrack.in to everyone I meet these days -- journalist colleagues, NGO types, academics. They can't believe how well it works. Great work coming from India. ... using Newsrack pretty extensively!" - Frederick Noronha, Independent Journalist, Goa http://fn.goa-india.org
- Software for society's sake, Economic Times; 29th March 2007
- NewsRack makes online news archiving easy, Meri News; 23th May 2006
- It makes many jobs easy, Down to Earth; 6th March 2006
For more information, contact Subramanya Sastry (subbu AT newsrack DOT in), and visit http://newsrack.in
ESG is an independent not-for-profit organisation that promotes the cause of environmental and social justice through research, documentation, advocacy, training and campaign support. We aim to support the rights of local communities and voiceless ecosystems in a responsible, progressive manner that keeps contextual complexities in mind.