When the first edition of Strategic Communications for Nonprofits appeared in 1999, researching news coverage of an issue was time-consuming, expensive or both. To keep up, I would spend an hour or two each week perusing the newspapers and magazines in the library at the National Press Club to see if there were important articles on energy efficiency or any of my other interests. Every month, an extensive index to articles in major US publications would appear to help me fill in what I might have missed.

The research in the pre-Internet era was brutish, nasty and anything but short. It was  pokey, tree-based and full of holes. But we muddled along somehow.
 
(I often muddled in illustrious company. Columnist Mark Shields, a regular on PBS’s “NewsHour,” would often be there digging through the piles next to me. I warned him that if he were caught doing his own research, he could be drummed out of the Pundits League.)

Commercial news retrieval services like LEXIS-NEXIS were long available, but they charged high hourly fees for use of specialized terminals that put them out of reach of most nonprofits. Newspapers were starting to post their current content on-line, but someone trying to find a newpaper story published just two weeks earlier might hit a wall beyond which retrieval of a single article might cost several dollars, which adds up quickly when you’re searching for dozens of articles at a time.

Today, there are several search tools for news that are just as powerful as the paid services of days gone by, and in some instances, they are free of any charge.

One of those tools is the free service of alerts from Google News.   In the left-hand column of this page, right under the Top Stories, is a link to News Alerts, a service that delivers the results of Google searches on any topic or query to your inbox. Yahoo.com offers a similar service, as do CNN.com and other news sites.

For general background on major issues at no cost, the search function on the home page of the New York Times is hard to beat for its depth of coverage, timeliness on current issues, and searchability.  You only have to register on the site to gain access to its amazing free news archives going back to 1981. Articles that appeared earlier than that, including articles stretching all the way back to 1851, are available at a fee.

With research at your fingertips, and often for free, there’s no excuse for not keeping up on your issues so that when you talk to journalists, you will be well-informed and up to speed.