We live in an age of 24-hour news, where the cameras roll constantly and correspondents across the globe report on every conceivable subject – from bombs in Baghdad to Paris Hilton’s prison diet – at every hour of the day and night.

News junkies have current affairs at their fingertips like never before. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the web, where thousands of sources provide up-to-the-minute coverage of world events. As a result, more than 16m Brits visited the web for news in May 2007, according to the media analyst Nielsen//NetRatings – a 21% increase since just October 2006.

But in this digital age, where anyone can write what they want and post it on a website, how do you know who to trust? Simple, you follow our step-by-step guide to the best sites out there.

Online, you will find portal sites that pull in stories from reputable sources worldwide and present them all on one page so you can cherry-pick what you want; fully fledged web television news channels; and even specialist sites catering to niche subjects.

NEWS PORTAL

For a quick hit of news from around the world, Google and Yahoo! are useful starting points. Both sites are aggregators, which mean they scour trusted online news sources worldwide, including every major newspaper, and present links to their stories on a single portal page. This gives them wide scope and speed, providing a broad snapshot of the day’s events.

Both Google and Yahoo!’s services also allow you to create a personalised home page where you can decide which subjects you want to read about – UK news only, for instance, or business, or sport. You simply have to sign up, which is free, then tell the site which subject areas interest you.

For a different kind of aggregator, bookmark Arts and Letters Daily, which concentrates on cultural happenings. The editors pick a rolling selection of the best analysis, opinion and reviews on the web, from Boris Johnson writing about Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, jogging, to the global spread of sushi and Clive James on how he’d have been happier as a gravedigger.

Or you can let normal surfers be your editors. Digg.com and Newsvine.com are two sites whose users post the stories from around the web they find interesting – these come from blogs as well as more reputable sources. The stories are presented in list form, and the more people who post the same story the higher that story appears in the list. The result is that you can often find stories here that you might not have come upon on a more conventional site.

VIDEO NEWS

It’s a broadband, YouTube world, and any news gatherer worth its salt has a multimedia arm. Take Times Online, which offers a range of video channels with regularly updated reports on world news, business and entertainment as well as video clips made by Times journalists. Blinkx.com is like a Google for video clips. Simply tap in your search terms and this archive will scour 12m hours of web video, including content from the BBC, ITN, Sky News and Reuters.

While many sites offer the opportunity to view recorded video reports that have been made for television, none gives you the freedom of CNN’s online news channel, though it is somewhat US-centric. Around a main video screen, further screens show a choice of four streaming news channels, and short of dispatching correspondents across the globe the viewer is in control of what news to watch. You can dip into a live feed from the American Senate, the latest reports from Wall Street or what’s on CNN’s actual television channel at that moment. There are also interesting shorts on such subjects as the Yotel, an hour-by-hour airport hotel that is the brainchild of the Yo! Sushi founder.

For something completely different, Rocketboom is a perky, witty and addictive daily three-minute video report put together by amateurs in America. Sometimes it satirises a big story, sometimes it looks at something geeky, or just plain odd – time travel experiments, lakes full of jellyfish, iPhone lust, and humans in Transformer costumes.

SPECIALIST SITES

Whatever your preference, there’s a specialised news site. Why wade through the BBC’s sports site when all you want is the footie and you can get that at www.football365.com? And why wade through all the footie if you’re a Liverpool fan, when the club’s official site has exclusive interviews with players, fan polls and videos of the reserves? However, much of the material can be uncritical.

Many of the latest gadgets turn up on www.engadget.com. Green news, done in a surprisingly balanced way, is best served by www.treehugger.com. Gossip and entertainment news are the stock in trade of www.digitalspy.co.uk, which has sections on gaming, cults and music as well as the obligatory celeb-spotting, while for the week’s essential digest of the quirky and the scurrilous, www.popbitch.com is still essential reading.

LET RSS TAKE THE STRAIN

So, you have a chosen a set of news sites that suit you, but the problem is that they update irregularly, so you have to keep visiting them to find out what’s happening – it’s time consuming and annoying. Thankfully you don’t need to, due to a snazzy technology called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a way of checking the newest material on a selection of websites without having to visit them. Instead, headline bulletins – also known as news feeds – are sent to you.

You can set up your computer to be updated with RSS feeds in two ways. The first way is to download and install a feed reader program such as SharpReader.

Once installed, you open the reader program and can start telling it which headlines from which websites you want to receive.

Many websites offer an option to send their information to you as a feed. For instance, for feeds from Times Online you need to go to here. This page lists all of the different feeds that you can get, such as business, sport and travel. Each of these feeds is represented by a specific address (You can find the sports feed here, for example), which you must copy and paste into your reader. Then, whenever a new story appears on that particular part of the site, your reader picks it up and lists it as a headline, which you can click to open up the whole story.

The other option is to set up a web page to collect RSS feeds. Many sites offer this service, and the most user-friendly, predictably, is Google Reader, which is free to sign up to.

This works in much the same way as the feed reader, except that instead of opening up a program on your computer to see feeds, you access a personal web page. A short video on the site quickly takes you through the simple setup process. Alternatively, many web browsers have neat RSS features built in.