dpa Online, produced by dpa-info.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH, is the comprehensive news channel intended for Internet use. In 1996 dpa launched its first online news service and quickly established itself as the market leader in the German-language zone of the Internet. Rather than providing its news services direct to Internet end users, dpa provides the opportunity to employ dpa Online to others with an Internet presence.

dpa Online in English, launched in March 2001, is a full-service online news product that covers everything from world politics to business, sports and entertainment combining text, pictures and graphics. Available in both a "pull" version - dpa Online - and a managed push service - dpa Online plus - this is the ideal news product for integration into a wide variety of sites.

At any one time, dpa Online contains at least 100 compact news items. At least 20 photographs per day provide illustration for the stories. dpa Online is produced round the clock at dpa's news centres and is up to the minute. Enhancing the service are still graphics. In addition, dpa offers on a subscription basis a separate product, dpa-InfoActive, which provides the full range of interactive info-graphics.

The pull variant of dpa Online is primarily aimed at web newsrooms where raw news is captured and then given continued editorial processing. The push format of dpa Online is particularly suited for those requiring automated or semi-automated insertion of content into websites and who wish to concentrate their editorial resources elsewhere. The multi-media newsfeed can either be published right onto a website, or be routed into a database from which editorial staff can oversee its publication. This allows the material to be integrated with feeds from other providers or to be packaged with the customer's own material.

The individual files can be freely filtered according to the customer's requirements. dpa takes responsibility for the news management, i.e. it deletes news items that are no longer up to date and replaces them with fresh items; tags the items high or low priority as appropriate; and links text to the matching pictures and still graphics. The result: a high-quality, well-structured news service.

The dpa Online newsfeed's approximately 100 tightly written, brief news reports per day are designed to fit into busy web pages. Each news text is 90 words or less in length, with a headline of no more than 67 keystrokes that, again, make them fit for the mobile internet (SMS, WAP etc.). Clients of dpa Online plus will also be able to link 30 of the short articles with the respective full text story. Photo illustrations are provided in online-optimized resolution to ensure fast download times for end-users.

• Standing out from the daily newsfile are between 10 and 20 top world-news events, with each news item being replaced with an update as the story unfolds. Human-interest angles on the day's top news stories may appear as separate, stand-alone items.
• The dpa Online sports section gives especially strong coverage of European soccer as well as international tennis, motor sport and U.S. basketball (NBA). Major events such as Olympic Games and world championships are closely covered.
• Entertainment news focuses on pop and Hollywood celebrities who are well recognized throughout the world.
• A variety of consumer-oriented news includes travel tips, automotive advice and lifestyle topics. Science coverage has a special focus on medical breakthroughs.
• News about the Internet and tips on using computers is a regular daily feature.
• The cornerstone of dpa Online's business coverage is data from the financial markets: stock indices from Tokyo, Frankfurt, New York etc. and euro-dollar exchange rates.

The news cast is pre-sorted into five main topic areas:

• International politics
• General topics, including human interest
• Business news
• Entertainment, science and health news
• Sports news

In order to further automate filtering, all stories carry eight-digit subject codes. These are standard numbers drawn from the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) classification. In addition, story locations are part of the metadata attached to every text. The master list of about 100 subjects (both keywords and IPTC codes) and more than 200 locations will be distributed to customers and only altered after sufficient advance notice has been given.

Portals and websites interested in linking more full-text articles with the respective brief news reports can do so by subscribing to modules of the dpa international service in English - an ideal complement to dpa Online.