Press Release

NewsNow launches new look web site

Jan 17th 2002

The UK's leading news aggregator www.NewsNow.co.uk has unveiled a new web site which improves the look and feel of the popular news portal as well as providing more information to users of NewsNow's subscriber newsfeed services.

New features include:

• Business Services including intranet, extranet and email alerts
• Submit-a-site option for new publishers
• Case Studies of existing customers
• Frequently Asked Questions: all about online news monitoring

"Since our launch five years ago NewsNow has become the leading UK news portal and provider of online news monitoring services to firms of all sizes. The new look web site confirms our wish to offer the best and most flexible news monitoring service on the Internet," said Nick Gilbert, NewsNow CEO.

The site redesign was co-ordinated by Adam Newby, NewsNow IT Manager.

"We value functionality over aesthetics. The site should get you the information you want quickly and easily; and after that it should look good," said Newby.

"The huge variety of news sources and topics means you're bound to find the news you're interested in. The simple, 'does what is says on the tin' approach to the design makes it easy to use."

Alex Hazell, NewsNow Sales and Marketing Director says the new site is now a prime example of e-commerce in action: "Thanks to our free trial service, now clearly visible throughout the site, we are actually selling newsfeeds directly off the site. This is ensuring that we remain a profitable company and also reduces the time it takes for new customers to test our service and specify exactly what kind of newsfeed they want, allowing them to monitor the news that most matters to them."

Web design agency MWA was responsible for the visual design of the site. It used Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop to produce GIF files for our use, as well as mock-up images showing what the pages should look like.

NewsNow then generated templates for the site using its own in-house templating system, which handles generating the dynamic news content. All our HTML editing is done 'the hard way', i.e. using a text editor!

The site is aimed at anyone who wants news from a wide variety of sources in one place. We're particularly popular with sport fans, especially football enthusiasts, and our IT and business sections also get a lot of hits.

The site runs entirely on open source technology (Linux/Apache/MySQL).

Contact Details

Jan 17th 2002, NewsNow Publishing Limited, London England

Background Information

NewsNow is Europe's pioneering Internet news monitoring agency and supplier of tailored, aggregated newsfeeds.

NewsNow's customers hail from the world's PR, marketing, communications and web design departments of SME, national and multinational businesses and charitable organisations.

These organisations use NewsNow to gather and monitor news relevant to their company, clients, competitors, market industry and sector. Their news feeds may be delivered to their inbox, to their intranet or extranet or alternatively to NewsNow's secure web archive interface.

NewsNow is one of only a few companies able to offer this kind of online monitoring. Its customers include Exxon, Rolls-Royce, AMD and Sony Computer Entertainment.

NewsNow Key Points

• Searches over 37,000+ sources in real time
• Monitors news in over 141 countries and 20 languages
• Searches most leading international, national and regional newspapers; consumer, trade and technical titles; government press pages; press releases; blogs, webzines, newsletters and leading underground and alternative publications
• Offers sophisticated positional and proximity matching - the ability to specify keywords and phrases and the relationships between them
• No expertise necessary - professional staff take care of your changing needs
• Sources added or removed on request
• 30 day news archive
• No per-article charges
• Fixed monthly fees
• Delivery by email alert, via secure web archive interface or to any intranet or website

NewsNow History

NewsNow was founded in 1997. It began as a news aggregation website (www.NewsNow.co.uk) that fast became the UK's leading news portal. Today the portal features over 2300 topics and attracts 118 million page impressions monthly.

In 1998 NewsNow began delivering tailored news feeds to customers' websites.

In 2001, the addition of a sophisticated custom search engine capable of full-text search enabled NewsNow to deliver high-quality but cost-effective tailored Internet news monitoring solutions to PR, marketing and communications professionals of SME, national and multinational businesses and charitable organisations.