What is the News Brief?

The EMM News Brief is a summary of news stories from around the world, automatically classified according to thousands of criteria. It is updated every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day.

The default page is the "Top Stories" section that automatically detects the stories that are the most reported in each language at the moment. Other pages present the news stories in one of many different classifications. The left hand side menus lead you on to many further topic specific pages, again generated automatically by the EMM Alert system. The default language is taken from your browser but you can change to another language by simply selecting a new language from the drop down menu.

In addition, it is possible to search through an index of the previous news stories (references to over 20.000,000 articles are kept in the index).

In the News Brief, a summary of each article is presented with a link to the original location so that the full article may be read.

How does it work?

The EMM News Brief is generated automatically by software algorithms without any human intervention.

The EMM Alert system detects and classifies articles as they appear in the media. Each alert definition consists of a list of multilingual keywords (the bait) designed to catch future articles (the fish). When caught, a reference to the article is placed into the appropriate category. Alerts are often grouped under a general heading (e.g. each Directorate General of the Commission). The World section consists of the  latest articles for each country in the world organised by continents. Country watch pages track trends for individual countries.

How rapid is EMM NewsBrief ?

The NewsBrief is generated automatically every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The "Top Stories" depends on a Breaking News algorithm which detects a rapid growth in the number of articles reporting on a certain news story. The time needed to trigger a "Breaking News" event will depend on the magnitude of the event, as the system detects changes in News fluxes. For major events this is typically 30 minutes. EMM Alerts run continuously, scanning and checking all newly published articles against multi-lingual lists of keywords. The on-line sources are checked regularly, some sources are checked as frequently as every 5 minutes. An alert scan of 30.000 keywords against 650 subjects on a new article is done in a fraction of a second.

For comments and suggestions on the NewsBrief web site please email Email address as image.

How thorough are they?

The full text of the article is checked, not just the headline and abstract. The alert system actually "reads" the article for you.

How can I follow Alerts and Breaking News?

There are two ways you can keep up to date.

Push method

To subscribe to an alert by e-mail, click on the Subscribe button () or on the "Subscribe to this section" option in the top .

You will be sent a confirmation email which will contain a link. When you click on that link your web browser will open a form that allows you to specify the exact alert you wish to subscribe to, in which languages and whether you wish an immediate email or a daily summary.

If you have any problems subscribing to an alert, send an e-mail to Email address as image. stating which alert you wish to receive and which of the two options suits you best.

Pull method