A couple of years ago I talked about Google Alerts. (https://byteoftheweek.wordpress.com/2005/06/15/another-look-at-google/) In short, you tell Google to track certain terms and they send you an email when they add web sites that contain those terms to their database. I love it for tracking rural broadband issues. (I track that kind of thing: http://www.blandinonbroadband.com/.)

I wished that there was a resource where I could track terms only on Minnesota pages or Minnesota news sources. Magic presto – I got an email from Mark in West Virginia on a new service that does just that.

State Newslines (https://www.statenewslines.com) tracks news sources by state. They have free and premium services. I know it’s not like me but I use their premium services so I’ll start by talking about them.

For a fee, I can have State Newslines keep track of words and phrases as they appear on Minnesota news publications. I think monitor about 50 sources. I have them track [broadband and internet]. Each morning I get an email with any articles that contain one of those terms. It’s like a super focused Google Alert and it saves me time and gives me a heads up on articles I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Also I can search Minnesota-only publications at any time.

For free, I can check out the headlines from MN papers on one page and I can do a keyword search of Minnesota-only publications.