There are thousands of websites available which publishes recent news within few hours of the incident
. In addition to this, many established newspapers like New York Times and The Telegraph and almost all leading magazines have started publishing their online editions. These well known websites command a large viewership as they already have a very good reputation as far as presentation of news is concerned.
It has also been seen that almost all the major search engines like Google and Yahoo have started their news section. They publish the recent news category wise and they take the news items from the various websites that publish that news. This effort has a positive and negative aspect in different ways. The viewer goes to Google or Yahoo news and gets all the details of the news items. Thus Google news gets established as a brand in his mindset. The various news related websites which get enlisted on Google news never gets positioned as a brand on its own in the web news world.
Still it has been seen that many such news related websites struggle for getting enlisted in Google news. Their advantage is that Google is offering them a huge platform and these not so big websites get a huge amount of traffic by getting enlisted in Google news without much effort. It was not possible for them to get that huge amount of traffic on their own effort until and unless they are an established brand on their own. These websites earn revenue from the traffic they get as they have Adsense or bidvertiser or other pay per click advertising accounts in their websites.
Another interesting factor is that these websites cover various categories of recent news. Some of the websites cover news items exclusively for certain sectors. There are many websites which cover news only on technical gadgets. Some websites cover news items only on recent mobile phones while another seemed to be covering only iPad related news items. They are normally listed under science and technology category in the Google news section.
One can get details of news covered one very topic under the sun in the news section of these big search engines like Google or Yahoo. In that sense, they are really posing a strong competition to the online editions of the reputed brands also.