For those of you that are news trading or just interested in keeping up to the minute on any news developments, you know how hard it is to obtain it in real-time.   It isn't so hard if you have the money to subscribe to Bloomberg which will run you in the thousands per month. (http://about.bloomberg.com/contact/sales.html) 

Most of us don't have the luxury of doing so therefore the alternative is newsstrike.  Newsstrike uses TeamSpeak software to call out news in real-time though I've heard it lags by a couple of seconds.  TeamSpeak became popular in the Gaming world with games such as Medal of Honor where teams could speak to each other while they blew each other up.  The software requires you to configure a connection to Newsstrike with a username and password.  You can get these by subscribing to the service which is FREE at http://newsstrike.com/subscribe.shtml

Some of us again don't have the luxury of listening live to news while we are slaving away at our full-time jobs so another alternative is to go to the government website responsible for the news release and find the URL of the latest news release.  This requires you to constantly hit REFRESH on your browser until the newest release is actually posted.  I've found that sometimes it's within seconds and sometimes within minutes.  For instance, the US Census bureau handles the release of the Durable Goods report so you can go to the URL http://www.census.gov/indicator/www/m3/adv/index.htm and keep refreshing until you see this month's report was updated.

Yet another way of getting the news which is my preferred method when I'm not looking for real-time but looking for it quick, is to get it from Briefing.com.  I find that the news comes through in the same minute that it is released and if there are multiple reports released at a particular time, you can see them all on 1 page.  The calendar can be found at http://www.briefing.com/Investor/Public/MarketAnalysis/Calendars/EconomicCalendar.htm

These are the best ways I've found over the last year of getting economic report data as quick as possible.  If you know of any additional ways, please share.