News on the Internet usually means newsgroups, divided by topic, which you can read, participate in, and digest at your leisure. This collection of newsgroups is called Usenet, and there are many thousands of topics currently covered by a group. These newsgroups are analagous to the Openmail bulletin board (each group being a topic), or to chat rooms (a less perfect, but functional, analogy).
You can read news through Netscape, which is a convenient way to go (since it is a graphical interface), and the one made most widely available at Webster. But there are other "newsreaders" around, most of which run as text-based interfaces (think DOS or Unix) and usually are not so convenient to work with. But everyone has their own preferences, and if you have an account on Webster2, you can read news with a program called "tin."
In general, the news groups are run in a roughly democraticway, with more or less frequent slides into anarchy. That is to say, there is no formal control over the content that people "post" to a newsgroup, except the peer pressure exerted by the rest of the folks who enjoy reading from and participating in that newsgroup. There are exceptions to this rule, in that some groups are formally moderated and someone exercises editorial control over the content and must approve postings.
Actual newswire coverage of what most folks think of as news is also available, offered by a
company called
Clarinet. You can read these as Usenet newsgroups as well. It is possible to pay for
access to other commercial news feeds, like Reuters
and Dow Jones
, but these are not supported by Webster.
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© 1996, Webster University