The article introduces a special section that aims to bring together some of the best work to date in the creation of intelligent News on Demand systems that automatically process news and provide personalcasts, tailored presentations to satisfy individualized user needs. NOD systems integrate computing results from the speech, language, and image processing communities to create a new class of multimedia information access systems. Scientifically, these systems are interesting as corpus-based and knowledge-based text, speech, and image processing are converging to support cross-media understanding, resulting in many new research areas such as multistream segmentation, topic detection and tracking, and multimedia summarization. Commercially, this technology and related systems enables several new application opportunities in news delivery distributed education, and intelligence/surveillance. Several start-ups and innovative corporations are beginning to sell novel systems and services and national broadcasters.