Finding Permanent Links to News Sources

It's important that in your references you provide weblinks to sources that are as permanent as possible.

CongressDaily stories: CongressDaily is a valuable source of detailed information about the actions of the U.S. Congress. However, it is also very expensive and its articles are generally behind a paywall, preventing most citizen editors from being able to read the full article. Government Executive, however, often reprints articles on its website, which is not behind a paywall. Before linking to CongressDaily as a source, check the Government Executive site for a link to a copy of the story.

Yahoo! News stories: Yahoo! news links expire quickly—months, weeks or even days after being posted—leaving articles to which they are attached orphaned, particularly if only the article's URL is posted as a source. When Yahoo! links are included in the External Links section accompanied by an article title, it is often impossible to locate another active link for the reference. Yahoo!, as do others using wire service reports, frequently slightly or greatly alters the original article title, making it most often impossible to locate a replacement source for the article.

Often, blogs follow the same practice of posting the Yahoo! news links within cited material. Linking to a blog which has as its sole source a Yahoo! news link will also result in an inactive link in the future, rendering the quoted material without a source and unreliable, as well.

Although the WaybackMachine and other archive sources are valuable tools, they cannot locate expired Yahoo! links. Once the article disappears from Yahoo!'s cache, neither a Yahoo! or a Google search will be able to find the link.

Google news stories: The most reliable way to ensure that news articles do not end up with inactive links (and sans a reliable source for the information to which the URL was attached) is to use a Google search to find a more reliable source for the article.

Note that weblinks to articles published by The New York Times and Yahoo! often expire (or are archived for $$$) within a very short time.

However, you can use the New York Times link generator to find permanent, non-pay links for older New York Times stories.
Many of the same articles posted in the New York Times are cross-posted at the more reliable International Herald Tribune.

Note that The Washington Times daily news links have a short expiration date. An archived link can be accessed via WaybackMachine.org.

Google also includes links to online news journals, blogs, forums, message boards, and just about any possible online link, including cross-posted articles at Free Republic (with comments), NewsMax, and WorldNetDaily, and archived articles at truthout and Common Dreams.

Significant article links are often buried several pages deep, however, and searching beyond the first five, ten, twenty or more pages of search results may be necessary to arrive at a "gem".

BuzzFlash: BuzzFlash provides links to current headline news and blog articles, as well as its own articles and provides a news alert service.

Ice Rocket: The Ice Rocket search engine accesses blogs, the web, MySpace, and news links. A word of caution is necessary, though, regarding blogs: unless you are familiar with a particular blog, tread carefully, as spyware, adware, malware and trojans may be lurking there. The same applies to MySpace pages.

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