WHAT
"Humanitarian News" publishes around 19,000 articles per month, retrieved from +/- 800 different sources: blogs, websites or news bulletins. Each source covers the subjects we are interested in, be it aid, development, humanitarian issues, poverty relief, news from the nonprofit sector or the environment. While all sources are carefully handpicked to keep the information relevant, the updates and retrieval of the articles are automated.

"Humanitarian News" is a personal initiative, started in August 2009. I continuously add new features.

WHY
A lot is published about aid, humanitarian work, and the nonprofit world as a whole. It fascinates me, both in the quantity of information and in the way it is dispersed. Few social aggregators, bookmarking and social media sites have categories specifically for the nonprofit sector, or offer selected news for the "soft" sector. Stuff is scattered everywhere. Searches via Google News on criteria like "aid" will more likely return articles about "financial aid to US banks" rather than publications about "development aid to Africa"...

For a year, I have been experimenting with different means to get the relevant information automatically collected in a simple, low bandwidth and searchable site. Not only would it give those working in the nonprofit sector an easier overview, but it would also help in broadcasting humanitarian news to the "general public". Call it "advocacy through information"... And that's the purpose of "Humanitarian News".

HOW
"Humanitarian News" is split into different sections, sorted by source rather than subject:

• AidNews contains only aid news articles and press releases from humanitarian agencies. There are about 90 different news sources in this stream, in addition to articles I select manually via my Google Reader.
• AidWorker Blogs is a collection from 70 different blogs by individual aidworkers spread all over the world. These people are "one the ground", working on development and aid projects.
• NonProfit News contains the most recent updates from about 60 different sources in the soft sector: websites from individual organisations and sites specializing in nonprofit news.
• NonProfit Blogs has by far the largest set of sites: over 480 blogs are automatically monitored for updates. The full blog list is available via my NonProfitBlogs Delicious bookmarks.
  These sites are all blogs - not websites - either from organisations, individuals, project teams, magazines and a few companies who provide specific services for the nonprofit sector.
• Green News covers articles about the environment and nature conservation, retrieved from +/- 110 sources.

I broadcast the latest updates via @HumanityNews on Twitter.

Enjoy!

Peter

peter (at) theroadtothehorizon (dot) org