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Spring Issue 2008
SOT Web Site Unveils Link to Syndicated News
Submitted by: Phil Wexler 2007–2008 WWWAC Chair
SOT’s World Wide Web Advisory Committee (WWWAC) has been investigating options for delivering current world news, over and above internal SOT developments, to our membership. Syndicated News is now available on the SOT Web site. The intent is to broaden the limited news coverage currently available on the SOT Web site, with frequently updated stories of relevance to toxicology worldwide. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology seemed the best approach for disseminating news media stories from a balanced array of sources. After evaluating various options, we settled on syndicated coverage from Environmental Health News (EHN). EHN is a publication of Environmental Health Sciences, a not-for-profit organization founded in 2002 to help increase public understanding of emerging scientific links between environmental exposures and human health. Below are some of EHN’s stated criteria for selection of stories.
"We look for all relevant stories in the mainstream press that are published on the web. Most of our sources are daily newspapers and weekly or monthly news magazines. They include English language newspapers with international audiences like the New York Times, the London Guardian and the Jakarta Post; the major newswires like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse; as well as medium-sized newspapers and small locals published in towns across the US, the UK, India, Australia and New Zealand. We will sometimes post links to radio or television stories. We also cover scientific journals that carry articles relevant to environment and health, such as Science and Nature, and science magazines like New Scientist and Science News. While we do survey several chemical and medical publications like Chemical & Engineering News, we do not post articles from the environmental press nor business trade press".
"Within that universe, EHS publishes what we find, irrespective of the opinion or viewpoint expressed, or whether or not material in the article is consistent with our understanding of current science. We often publish several articles from different newspapers covering the same story, as well as multiple editorials and op-eds about the same subject. We take this approach based on the belief that readers who come to EnvironmentalHealthNews.org want to see a wide range of how issues are being covered by the mainstream press."
EHN offers any number of pre-packaged or customized feeds. For the SOT site, we chose Environment and Health, which story postings are at the top of the page and updated very frequently, typically many times each day, followed by New Environmental Health Science. Each posting consists of a date, a hot-linked story title, a one or two line summary, and a hot-linked media source title. Thus, one can easily jump to the full story.
To access the EHN news component from SOT’s homepage, click on News on the left menu, and then on Syndicated News. A feedback form to help SOT assess the utility of this new feature will also be available. At this point we are considering the EHN page a pilot project, available for use and evaluation, but subject to alteration. We encourage you to use the feedback form to let us know your opinion of it.
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