Each hour, MDN updates the story descriptions for the major news outlets across the state. Up to five separate pages can be searched or displayed - main news, state news, local news, political news and editorials.

Only categories for which a news outlet as a seperate page will have a search-option check box. So, if an outlet does not have a seperate page for state news, that option will not be available for a display descriptions.

There are two ways you can do a search of the descriptions. For both, you must check one or more of the page boxes. The buttons at top listing news categories and the buttons on the left listing news outlets will check several boxes at once.

For example, clickins the Opinion button will check all the opinion-page boxes for the news outlets.

After selecting the categories and news outlets for which you wish to see the story descriptions. There are two search options:

• Get Today’s Story Descriptions: This will display the list of headlines MDN has retrieved within the past hour for the news outlets and categories you have selected.

• Search: The option searches our archives of past headlines for the news outlets and categories you selected. To invoke this command, there are two additional entries you must make:

  • Month: This obviously is the year and month for which you wish to conduct a search.

  • For: Enter the word or phrase for which you which you wish to search MDN's news-description archives.

    The search is case insensitive and, as this help is being written, it othersise is pretty primitive. If you enter more than one word, what you enter will be treated as a complete fragement to search.

    In other words, entering the words the and governor will retrieve only story descriptions in which those two words the governor are together. It wil not retrieve a description that contains the word the and somewhere else in the description the word governor.

Notes and Limitations

• MDN uses a complicated and extensive set of algorithms to extract the story descriptions of news outlet web pages. However, news organizations regularly update their web-page designs occasionally causing MDN's list for a news organization's descriptions to not be updated until we catch the error.

  In addition, news organizations may terminate web pages on specific topics like State News. However, we have retained the checkbox accesses to these pages for archive searches.

• MDN does not archive complete stories. Only the brief descriptions and links a news outlet provided at the time are available from MDN. So, the link for an archived story description may not be valid months later.

  MDN does not archive the entire text of news storie, for a very journalistic reason.

  To address declining revenues in the digital era, many news outlets increasingly are requiring a subscription to search their archives. As an organization of former journalists, MDN does not undercut the revenue opportunities for news organizations.