In the past, if you wanted to get the latest news about the happenings in your town, in the nation, or across the globe, you only had a handful of options. You could read any one of a handful of newspapers that were delivered daily, if you prefer the print medium for your news, but the downside of reading the newspapers is that the news you get today is actually the news of yesterday, so that by the time it gets to you for you to read, it is already several hours, or even almost a full day, old. There is radio news, but you have to wait for the regularly scheduled broadcasts of news on the radio, and when it comes on, you have to listen and sit through all of the news that is irrelevant to you in order to hear the news stories that matter to you. With radio news, another draw back is that you only have a few options in any particular area for where you can get your news, much like television news. Television news has typically come to us through one of the major networks, at a few regularly scheduled times for broadcast throughout the day, though in the past few decades, twenty four hour news stations have become popular, where you can turn on the television at any time of day or night to get the latest global news. The problem with twenty four hour news stations is that they are international, and do not cover your local stories, and that they are full of so much filler and fluff that is not actual news, that you often have to sit in front of the television for hours to find out what is actually going on in the world beyond the blurbs written on the crawler at the bottom of the screen.
Online news has changed all of that. With online news, you can get the news that you want and only the news you want, when you want it and where you want it, with no waiting and no filler. Online news allows you to focus in on the stories that matter to you without having to sit through all of the other news that does not concern you; you simply click on the stories that interest you and are taken directly to them, while all of the other stories that you do not care about simply go unread. Online news is also available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and instantaneously, as the news is happening, but not in the sense that twenty four hour news stations are available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. With online news, you can log on at any time and read the news as it happens, up to the moment, and at any moment you can go right to the headlines that are important to you. Perhaps best of all is that online news is available almost anywhere. You can get access to online news anywhere that you have access to the internet, and since most of us in the developed world have home computers with internet access, at least dial up internet access if not high speed internet access, then most of us can access online news from home. Of the people who do not have internet access at home, many of them can go to their local library and access the internet there, and anyone with a cell phone that can access the internet can read the online news anywhere they have cell phone service.