Apparently, they think the world revolves around cricket and Manchester United.
For several years now, I’ve been signed up with CNN to receive news alerts by email. In addition to news categories they suggested, I also created some custom news alerts, and for a long time they worked pretty well.
About a month ago, one custom alert that had hardly generated any stories (NTSB) suddenly started producing about two dozen a day and none of them had anything to do with the NTSB; they were all soccer (Europe only), golf, rugby tennis and cricket.
So I deleted that category from my alert settings. The next day one of my other custom alerts (Boston) started doing the same thing. Deleted.
Now I just have one left, about Japan. This morning in my mailbox, there were 41 news alerts labeled “Japan”, 39 of which were about sports and 36 of which had nothing to do with Japan.
Screw it, I’m sticking with Google news from now on. It’s a lot easier to customize. If only they’d just allow more than 10 categories.
