Dooyoo need any media links? (mediauk.com)

Member Name: mikeb

Product:	mediauk.com
Date:	04/02/01 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Compehensive media links, especially TV & newspapers.

Disadvantages: It's free, so none at all.

This site acts mainly as a directory of media sites rather than an actual source of news itself and is well worth bookmarking, in my opinion.

You can use this site completely unregistered or, if you prefer, can register for free to receive access to all the available features and a customised front page. Having used this site for ages now without actually registering and with no problems, I’ll go through the available features for an unregistered user like myself.

The front page is fairly basic with a menu down the left hand side of the page offering links to the following media categories:-

Television
Radio
Newspapers
Magazines
Job Search
News feeds/search
My Media UK
Index
Search

These links, when clicked, open up into several more sub-categories below the left hand menu and also change the main menu items. For example, clicking the Television link offers numerous channels such as terrestrial, ITV regions, OnDigital and Sky channels in alphabetical order, as well as some other general categories. Below this are other sub-manus to things like Teletext and television and media forums. There are plans to view channels by type, such as Films, sport etc but this is still under construction. The centre of the page has some more links to featured stories, a couple of pull down menu lists and a box to enter your e-mail address to be put on their mailing list. To the right are a few adverts for things like CD’s and books. There is even a link to watch news buletins on Real Player from channels like BBC1, ITN and Bloomberg. These work pretty well, although you have to wait for re-buffering occasionally.

Going back to the main menu on the left and clicking on the Newspapers link splits the left hand menu into:-

National Newspapers
Local Newspapers
Student Newspapers
Online News Sources
Newspaper Forums


Having mainly used this site for the l
ink to national newspapers I’ll concentrate on this, although the entire site seems to operate in a similar way so it is easy to navigate around it, once you’ve got the hang of it.

The national newspaper category has five sub-categories which are:-

Daily – UK
Daily – Scotland
Sunday – UK
Sunday – Scotland
Weekly

As it is Sunday, I’ll click on the third one down which expands downwards, showing 12 of the most popular Sunday newspapers including News of the World, Sunday Mirror, The Express and The Sunday Times. It’s now just a simple case of deciding which paper you want to see the online version of and clicking away. Occasionally the link will say that this paper does not yet have a website eg The Mail on Sunday, but they do still show some contact information and any associated websites so it’s not a complete waste of time. All of the newspapers own pages open in the right hand side of the page so that the left menu is visible at all times which makes it easier to navigate around. The content of those that do have a site varies considerably with some being as good as buying the paper itself but if I tell you that I have not actually bought a Sunday paper for months since finding this site, you will gather that most are quite comprehensive.

Having given you a flavour of this site, I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to take a look but if you’re looking for place to find links for everything to do with the media this is a good site to start at.

Summary: