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.