Wii gamers with broadband connections and the free Opera browser will be able to do a little news reading before embarking on their daily gaming adventure, as Nintendo has announced its Wii News Channel will launch this Saturday, the 27th of January.

The channel will primarily feature news (in multiple languages) and photos from the Associated Press, with the exception of the Japanese language version, which will come from an unnamed source.

As a nice feature, the News Channel will allow you to get news specific to the geographic region of your choosing, as you can zoom in and out of the Wii News map to pick your news.

So, look for the Wii’s blue glow when you wake up Saturday morning, and start reading some news. After all, only 11% of this nation gets its news from newspapers, meaning it shouldn’t be hard to beat that statistic with the number of people who get their news from their Wii, and how cool would that be? Pfft. Newspapers. They’re so 2006.

Update: Joystiq wins on covering this story, for no other reason but they created the perfect image to go with it.

Kudos, Joystiq. Oh, and bonus points for capturing both “terrorists” and “leftist FARC rebels” in the bottom scroll.

[tags]wii, news, nintendo, video games[/tags]