Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy played host to a gathering of journalists and academics last week to discuss the challenges to the media due to digital communication technologies. Real audio streams of the sessions are now available on the site. You can also read about the media and democracy panel discussion on Project for Excellence in Journalism website. One of the panels looked at

Do you have an innovative idea about how digital technology to connect people? If you do, then the Knight Foundation has some money for you. It is inviting applications to share in a US$5m pot of cash through its Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge. “Newspapers have long defined the communities we live in. They shape how we think about community and how we understand what’s happening on our block

Wanted: Talented reporter to cover a diverse community of 900,000 people. Good salary and benefits. Location: You computer. This may sound like a joke, but virtual communities are attracting the attention of big media. Reuters is opening a bureau in the online simulation game, Second Life. A Reuters media correspondent based in London, Adam Pasick, will be the virtual bureau chief, reporting on news of events in the game on

More bad news for UK newspapers. September is traditionally the month sales bounce back after the summer dip. But not this September. Numbers were down across the board, reports The Media Guardian: “Overall, the daily tabloids sold an average of 6,079,621 copies a day in September, a worrying fall of 1.12% on the holiday month of August and down 4.39% on September 2005, according to the sales figures for the

In September the Toronto Star started offering an afternoon edition in PDF format, called Star P.M. In an interview with CJR Daily, Michael Babad, the Star’s assistant managing editor, business, and Chris Carter, senior editor, internet, explain how the edition was conceived. Asked if the newspaper any set financial or readership goals for Star P.M., Babad says: “No, we never set a target because it was so new and we

Here is a good example of how technology is changing the way we gather the news. On Wednesday, Fox News had some of the first live video on the air from the scene of the New York City plane crash. As reported by Reuters, the video was shot on a Treo cell phone held by a Fox cameraman, Scott Wilder, who had been about 20 blocks away on another assignment

I was part of a panel discussion in Vancouver on Wednesday on the consequences of worldwide access to news through online media. The event was co-sponsored by the Faculty of Arts at University of British Columbia and The Vancouver Sun. It is part of UBC’s ArtWednesdays programme of events. Here is a the text of my talk, discussing how digital technologies change the way we get our news

Another example from Europe of how newspapers are trying to reinvent themselves, this time from Denmark. The Nordjyske group has launched its new ditcentrum website. It brings together two of its newspapers and is part of its print-web-mobile experiment. More on this in Jon Lund’s blog, director of the Association of Danish Internet Media. “Nordjyske today totally dominates the northern Jutland region with newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and websites.

I tend to think of Google as a media, rather than a technology, business. And now it has thrown itself headfirst into the business of online video, snapping up YouTube for US$1.65bn. The deal ends a weekend of speculation. More significantly, it is a huge vote of confident in the future of video over the internet by one of the most influential companies around. Quoted in The Times online, Google’s

Big wins for news sites which covered Katrina at the ONA awards. Full list of winners here. A good night particularly for Nola.com, the affiliated Web site of The Times-Picayune for its work during and after Hurricane Katrina