Obviously, the first place most people go to research an industry is Google, and you should too. The first page of links should provide you with some good resources to understand your industry. You can also press the "News" tab at the top of the page to get the latest stories.
There are also some other free tools available which can help you with your research:
Think Insights (http://www.google.com/think/): This has tons of content for 14 broad-based industry categories. It is largely a marketing–and advertising–focused website, but this can be useful as it allows you to see how different industries present themselves and communicate to the outside world.
Think Insights also has a visual interface that allows you to easily create graphs that show trends based on regions, countries, or the world. You can easily drill down on each to get more information and research.
Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends): Put in an industry, product, company, or whatever topic you want,...