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 Spanish, 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 rsponsibility for the news management, i.e. it deletes news items that areno 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.

• The service includes between 15 and 20 articles per day covering main political issues of international interest. These issues are constantly updated. The human aspects of the news are issued separately. The wide coverage of Latin America and Europe, characteristic for dpa, is also reflected in our online service.
• The sports section of dpa Online gives vast coverage of Latin-American and European football, international tennis matches, Formula 1, golf, cycling, athletics and American basketball (NBA), as well as of big tournaments and important sports events like the Olympic Games, Pan-American Games, Regional and International Soccer Cups and other major tournaments in the main sports categories.
• dpa Online gives diverse information about events and people of the cultural and entertainment world, including festivals, the Hispanic film world, the music world, the lives of Hollywood celebrities and fashion.
• dpa Online includes consumer-oriented news about a variety of topics such as travel, lifestyle and mainstream concerns. The coverage of scientific topics concentrates on medical innovations and health news.
• dpa Online also includes articles on the Internet and recommendations to facilitate the use of computers.
• The cornerstone of the economy section is data from the most important financial markets of the world, stock indices and the main topics surrounding the European and the Latin-American economy.

The newscast 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 Spanish - an ideal complement to dpa Online.