A few years ago, I looked into newspaper clipping services as a way of staying informed about topics of interest to me and my clients. I wanted an easy way to scan multiple sources of information without having to read dozens of newspapers, magazines and journals. However, I found most clipping services at the time to be cumbersome and difficult to use, with paper rather than email-based summaries. They were also fairly expensive for what I hoped to do.

I did find one resource that I liked called the MovingIdeas network. This site had an RSS feed that I could have published on our website. The articles that fed into the RSS had a decidedly progressive slant, although most had very detailed and valuable information about public policy, budget issues, education and health care compiled from a variety of sources. I continue to visit the site, although I no longer subscribe to the feed.

Recently I began using a newer resource, Google Alerts. This service basically performs a Google search at desired intervals (continuously, daily or weekly) and emails the search results. The search can be confined to news, blogs, groups or be comprehensive. I started a weekly search for news related to Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SSHS), as we've worked with a number of SSHS grantees and are anticipating a new SSHS grant to be released shortly. The weekly results are very interesting; today there were stories on a school uniform initiative promoted through an SSHS grant; a story on a recent shigella outbreak (which my son had a few months ago - yuck!); and a story on the limits of legal options around mental health services from the New York Times.

All staff members have also created their own alerts to monitor their areas of interest. It's led to some additional discussion within the office, about topics ranging from the most recent research on childcare to the latest gadgets available for analysis.