By: E&P Staff Gleaning Virginia's newspaper headlines just got a whole lot easier.
The Virginia Press Association has launched HeadlineVA.com, a Web portal with links to news stories from ? and Web sites of ? some 30 to 40 VPA member publications.
Scott Bateman, VPA?s online media consultant who designed the portal, said it is based on similar sites launched by Google News and Topix.net, but is designed to focus on Virginia topics, features, and issues.
A process monitors the member newspapers? RSS sites four times a day for story updates, grabs any changes and enters them into a database that Bateman checks each morning. He then selects which stories to lead HeadlineVA.com?s homepage.
The portal, which Bateman calls a work in progress, already has been in place for some time but it was not initially publicized in order ?to test technology, to figure out how to update it quickly and correctly, and then show it to people to get their input,? Bateman said in a statement ? likening it to ?a live research project.?
Visitors to HeadlineVA.com can also search every news site in Virginia by keyword. For example, a user who types the word ?Danville? in the site?s Google custom search bar will be taken to a screen showing every news-site link that includes the keyword.
?It?s an aggregation of thousands of stories to make it easy to find in one search,? Bateman added.
Virginia Press Association Executive Director Ginger Stanley lauded the portal as ?extending another arm of partnership between our member publications and their press association. It?s the latest of what we hope will be many promising and unique online initiatives to improve the Virginia newspaper industry.?
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