This is designed to be an easily navigable, lightweight news directory. No special knowledge of the local geography is needed to find your way around, as each country's news sources are listed purely alphabetically rather than by region. Inconsistently applied terms such as the 'Middle East' or 'Indian Sub-Continent' have also been avoided, so Israel is to be found under 'Asia' and Egypt under 'Africa'. The navigation takes you from west to east and north to south, with territories chiefly categorized according to continent, ocean or continental proximity.

In recent years the long-term reliability of news links has been greatly enhanced as more and more media organizations have opted for logical and user-friendly domain names and then adhered to them. Here we have further reduced the number of non-performing links by carrying only the top URLs of those foreign-language news sites that offer pages in English. In our experience, the URLs of sub-sections in English (like /en or /eng or /english, etc.) are constantly being tampered with, while the top-level local language URL (usually sporting a clearly flagged link to the English section) remains the same year in and year out. We go for the latter.

Where there are gaps, syndicated news aggregators, such as Yahoo! or Topix.net, provide us with a valuable back-up, especially for those remote parts of the world where few or no reliable news services in English are available. To help you ascertain the degree of openness to be expected from local news sources, a link is provided to each country's press freedom status according to Freedom House's 2008 survey.