From Missouri Digital News: https://mdn.org

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 has a seperate page will have a search-option check box. For example, if an outlet does not have a seperate page for state news, that option will not be available for display of story descriptions.

Except for minor editing issues and length-limits, the actual description for a story link is NOT changed! Instead, the story descriptions are exactly what the news outlet used to describe the links for the stories.

Also, excluded will be links that do not actually call up specific stories -- such as a help page.

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, clicking 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 selections you must select:

  • The year-month or Todayfor 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. 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.

  Display Page

  To return to the original selection page, do NOT click the back button of your browser.

  Instead, click the image. It will return to the page from which you called up the display page with your entries preserved.

  Note: To avoid clutter in the display page, a news outlet's topic page header will not be displayed if no links have been found or the topic page does not exist for the selected date.

Notes and Limitations

• MDN does not retrieve complete stories. Only the links in index pages that are available are available to the public are in MDN's links.

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

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

  That does impose a limitation to archived story links. At some point, a news organization may delete the page containing a story or changed the URL for the story. So, the link for an archived story description may not be valid months later.

• 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.

  The archive search for prior years as one limitation. Over the years, some news outlets have terminated specific pages on topics like State News. Since most searches are for current years, we've simplified search options to remove check boxes for pages no longer produced. That, of course limits searches for prior years when those page topics existed.

  For an archive search, you can get have your search topic pages that no longer exist. Just click the news outlet button. That will cause the search to include topic pages that no longer exist. For all newspapers, clicking the topic-page button will cause the search to cover topic pages for every newspaper that existed in the date you selected.