By Bruce Kratofil
Bruce Kratofil is President of BJK Research, Cleveland, OH. He also is NABE Webmaster, and co-author of "Windows 2000 Secrets." He can be reached at brucek@bjkresearch.com. I

Windows on the Web

by Bruce Kratofil

March 2000 

Note: Beginning with the January 2000 issue, Windows on the Web and PC Corner have moved from Business Economics to the web site, and will alternate bi-monthly. 

Financial and Business News

If your job requires you to be constantly in touch with financial markets, then you probably subscribe to a news service aimed at people like you. These services are fast, comprehensive, and expensive.

On the other hand, if you don't need to keep up with the market minute-by-minute, but you do want to keep in touch with business news, there are many free sites you can use to stay informed. This article will take a look at some of them. (Note: I researched much of this story on 3/21, the day the FOMC raised their interest rate targets. While I couldn't run tests to see how fast they posted stories about this widely-anticipated move, noting whether they had coverage within an hour or so was part of the criteria for whether the site was a "breaking news" site or not. Not fast enough for a day-trader, but faster than waiting for the Evening News.)

Traditional Media Outposts

Many traditional media organizations (newspapers, networks) have developed extensive web sites that cover breaking news. In my view, at least, I think better of sites if they have articles written by their staff members, instead of just copying the same Reuters or AP story that many others will carry. Some of the better ones include:

• New York Times Business- the Times site is free, but it does require you to register first, before you can read articles. (Once you register, the site can store your user name and password as a cookie on your computer, which will automatically log you in on future visits.) Not only will you find the articles from the morning paper, you will see breaking news coverage as well, both from NYT reporters, as well as stories from AP and Reuters.

• CNNfn - CNN's business site. They often do a good job linking their stories to other related stories or web sites. For instance, when they do a story on one of NABE's surveys, they usually include a link back to our web site.

• CBS MarketWatch - a quick check of bylines on many of their breaking stories indicate that they seem to rely on their reporters for a lot of the copy, while still having the wire services for other news.

• MSNBC- Is this New Media, or traditional media? in addition to stories from the MSNBC cable channel, and NBC News, this will also give you a link to the top stories at the Wall Street Journal site. To get to the entire WSJ site, you need a subscription. (The user interface to MSNBC is pretty clunky, unless you download their menu interface, a small ActiveX program, which allows you to scroll out headlines and quickly find all their content. Any  time you visit MSNBC, the site will look to see if you have downloaded its menu program. If not, it offers you the download. It doesn't take long at 56K, and you only have to do it once.)

• CNBC - their site has lots of synergy with the cable network, and shares headlines with MSNBC.

• Bloomberg- they pack a lot of headlines, charts and indicators onto their home page. You sometimes have to do some clicking around, but you can find a lot of stuff here.

• Washington Post - like the New York Times, they supplement the stories from the daily edition with coverage of breaking news. Pure business coverage is probably not as extensive as some of the others.

• Financial Times- extensive global coverage, although their use of animated graphics and Java effects causing things to jump around sometimes make me dizzy when looking at their home page. 

• USA Today Money - in addition to news, lots of links to info from Lipper, Bloomberg, Zacks and others. Lots of consumer-oriented information, too.

New Media

I count something as New Media if they are essentially Web-only, or only branched out later into TV, cable or print.

• Yahoo!- Yahoo (I'm going to leave off their exclamation point from now on) has a tremendous amount of news coverage. It is all repackaged, however, drawn from other sources. Their sources include AP, Reuters, Motley Fool, The Street, The Industry Standard and Institutional Investor. They are also good about setting up ongoing special sections covering big events. Also, be sure to check out their Finance page, which also includes links to Foreign Yahoo sites, such as Yahoo France, Yahoo Germany, or Yahoo Japan. These sites are in the native languages, and sometimes require a language pack to display correctly. What may be most impressive about Yahoo- they can do all this and still make a profit, still rare for a web site.

• The Street - most of their news coverage is free. (To get their analysis and commentary, you need a subscription.) They supply content to the New York Times online edition as well as Yahoo.

Most of the technology news sites, like Wired, ZDNet, and C|Net, will cover a small part of breaking business news, especially if it impacts the stock market. (Everyone in the tech industry keeps an eye on the value of their stock options.) However, they would not be the first place I would turn to for business news -- although they are where I go for technology news.

What's Not Here?

I didn't cover the sites that charge a subscription to see the majority of their content- so there is no coverage here to the Wall Street Journal, Market News International, or Bridge. You can also find more links in our Links section Financial Links and News Page