Today, most news publishers are happy to get the Web traffic that other sites send to them. It's simply the way of the Web, and publishers are foolish if they try to prevent other sites from steering new users to them. The concept is similar to the now-defunct New Century Network's Newsworks news aggregation site, which led its users to the top stories and best journalism produced by more than 100 U.S. newspapers. Just as Newsworks' editors chose the best stories from their affiliate sites, 1stHeadlines' editor chooses the best stories, aided by software algorithms that select major stories from a variety of news sites.
Headlines are simple links to the articles on the news sites, which appear in a new browser window.
1stHeadlines is different than Newsworks, however, in that it does not have relationships with the news providers. According to 1stHeadlines publisher Jim Rentz , a newspaper industry veteran turned Internet entrepreneur, the 1stHeadlines system sends a sophisticated spider out at 15-minute intervals to index the headline pages of its targeted news sites. Regarding the similarity to Newsworks, Rentz points out that his small company was able to accomplish in a couple months what New Century Network spent millions of dollars building. 1stHeadlines does not offer a news search function like TotalNews or NewsIndex, but Rentz says that's not the intent of the service. The 1stHeadlines system alerts Rentz when a problem occurs with one of the spidered sites, and the scripts that index the stories can be adjusted.