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By Eric Watkins
Yemen News tries to give readers a broad, balanced, and objective coverage of one of the least reported countries on earth. Toward that end, we consult a wide variety of web sources and, on a daily basis, email our findings free to subscribers.
One of the best sites we have found is that run by the American Institute for Yemeni Studies http://www.aiys.org. This is a mastersite which contains links to some 200 other websites devoted to Yemen. Looked at from the standpoint of news gathering, the AIYS site has some useful contributions to make, though of varying quality.
Go to the site and click on its link to Yemen Webdate. That will take you to several other choices, including Yemen News (no relation to us!). Click that and you will find an array of news sources to look at. Here is where you will find the variations in quality.
AIYS sends you to a preset search engine with a very long address: http://www.newsindex.com/cgi-bin/process.cgi?query=Yemen&mode=any. We have examined a lot of news search engines and this is not one of the better ones. We suggest you go instead to http://isleuth.com or to even to http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/World/Yemen, both of which provide a much better selection of news items. And, when we seek out very specialized information, we regularly go to http://www.google.com/--a new and extremely versatile search engine.
AIYS also directs you to http://www.arabicnews.com/--a useful site which we often consult, largely because of its Arab sourcing and because of its sense of insider reporting. Another site AIYS points to is http://www.al-bab.com. This site gets a mixed review: while it appears to be comprehensive, balanced, and objective, it actually is fairly selective, follows the Yemeni government line, and avoids anything tending toward criticism.
The AIYS site also links to a number of leading Yemen newspapers, whether government controlled, opposition controlled or independent. Of the independents, Al-Ayyam is by far the best. Among the English-language newspapers, AIYS offers three: The Yemen Observer (opposition-run) at http://www.theyemenobserver.ndirect.co.uk, Yemen Observer (government-run) http://yemenobserver.com.ye/ and The Yemen Times (independent) http://www.yementimes.com.
Finding up-to-date news on Yemen is for us a daily job. Filtering through the thousands of web pages devoted to Yemen is time-consuming and not always rewarding. But, when looking for good background material on almost any subject to do with Yemen, we find the AIYS site a good place both to start and to end up. In our book, it gets a five-star rating.
For readers who want a concise factual overview of the country, Reuters
AlertNet is hard to beat:
http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/countryprofiles/221859?version=1
Eric Watkins is a London-based commentator, specializing in the Middle East and Central Asia. He also edits Yemen News. To subscribe to Yemen News, write: eric.watkins@virgin.net.