Edited-Just-for-You News Is Now Available in Your Desktop Computer Every Day
Ever wish you could subscribe to a newspaper that’s edited just for you? You won’t find it on your doorstep, but you can read it on your PC.
Journalist, a $129 program for Microsoft Windows, allows subscribers to the CompuServe Information Service to design their own newspaper and have their PC publish it every day, automatically.
Using Journalist, my personal computer can put together Larry’s Gazette while I’m asleep, based on what it knows I want to read about. When I wake up, the latest world, national, sports and financial news is waiting, along with customized weather maps and stock charts. One hopes later releases of Journalist learn to make coffee.
I worked with a preliminary version. The final product is expected by the end of June. Journalist is published by PED Software Corp. (408-253-0894) in San Jose.
Journalist works like a desktop publisher. You lay out your newspaper on screen by using the mouse to create frames where stories will appear. If you want world news on the front page, you would first click the news icon and then the icon for world news.
You can do the same with national news, health and science, and so forth. Your sports page could be limited to baseball or could include football, hockey and tiddlywinks. You can display regional or national forecasts and weather maps.
The personal finance section of your paper can include general business news as well as stories about specific companies. You can get quotes for specific stocks and mutual funds. The program can even create line graphs, showing a stock or mutual funds’ performance over a specified period. I bought a mutual fund a year ago and, after using Journalist to create a chart, I have a much clearer picture of its performance than I would get by looking at raw numbers.
One of the most powerful features allows you to set up a clipping service. You supply key words or phrases and CompuServe scans its news sources for stories that include that text. From then on, CompuServe automatically saves them, and Journalist loads them into your personal newspaper.
Most of the wire service data that Journalist displays is available at no cost beyond CompuServe’s $8.95 monthly membership fee. The clipping service and company news, however, require access to CompuServe’s Executive News Service (ENS), which costs about 40 cents a minute. But because Journalist automates your on-line session, it is generally faster and therefore cheaper. ENS provides access to the Washington Post, Reuters, Associated Press and regional editions of United Press International.
You don’t need Journalist to create a CompuServe clipping service, but you need it if you want your clippings actually pasted into something familiar. Using a comfy metaphor, Journalist produces a paper that can be read on screen or attractively printed out. I prefer reading on screen because I can easily scroll from story to story.
But be careful. The news services on CompuServe are licensed for personal use only. Distributing them to others isn’t allowed. I’d like to see CompuServe offer an option that permits companies or schools to legally use the data for internal newsletters.
Journalist does remove some of the serendipitous sense of discovery that people cherish in newspapers. And there is no team of sharp-eyed editors exercising news judgment about what goes on Page 1. Perhaps someday news services will rank their stories on a scale of, say, one to five, so a program like this will have a way of gauging their importance and burying lesser items inside.
There isn’t a version of Journalist for America Online, but subscribers to that service can access the full text of the San Jose Mercury News and the Chicago Tribune. With both papers, you can locate the news by subject or key word.
For true news junkies, America Online has not only USA Today, AP, UPI and Reuters, but also Russia’s Tass news service, China’s Xinhua and France’s Agence France-Presse. Unlike CompuServe and Prodigy, all of America Online’s news services allow you to search for stories easily just by typing in, say, GRETZKY.
With services such as America Online and CompuServe, readers at home have access to more news sources than some newspaper editors.
With a program like Journalist, the news looks familiar too.
