Last session of the ONA which aims to highlight what’s coming up on the horizon for journalism. Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine His big thoughts are that journalism is becoming more collaborative and participatory. His new project, Daylife, aims to create a distributed platform for the world’s news, which analyses what is being covered, how and by whom

A session at the ONA conference on the potential of multimedia starts off with Brian Dumbar from Nasa. This might sound like an unusual choice, but as Dumbar says, the site sees itself as Nasa’s internal news wire. The site heavily uses multimedia to explain what Nasa is doing and make it accessible to a wider audience. Dumbar is spending his time clicking around the site, showing off stuff. But

Just at a session on how young people consume the news with a panel of four kids. Highlights: They use RSS to get their news, via portals such as Yahoo and Google Asked if they ever read a print newspaper, blank looks “E-mail is too slow.” They use instant messaging They want speed and convenience to get their news “If you pay for something, you’re a sucker.” They also dislike

Day two of the ONA and people here are talking about automated tools to manage content. Amy Webb of the website Dragonfire is first up, explaining how they run the site with five full-time people. The secret, she says, is using simple templates that anyone can handle. She showed a cool tool to create photo cubes which spin on the screen. Click on a photo and it enlarges to full-screen.

Post lunch at the ONA, something guaranteed to ruffle a few feathers of the established media. The guest speaker is Mark Cuban, who speaks out about sports, the media and anything else that takes his fancy on Blog Maverick. He has no prepared speech, or Powerpoint slides. It is a Q&A session. Everyone in the room is hear to see what insights an outsider like Cuban can offer. Is this

First keynote speaker at the ONA is the deputy head of news at the BBC, Adrian Van Klaveren, talking about making journalism that will inform people better about the world. The aim of the BBC – to be the global leader in 24/7 and on demand news and current affairs. So content has to be there when people want it and where they want it. This is a big change

Day one of the ONA conference in Washington DC. Highlights so far now – the organisation has 1,000 members, up from a handful six years ago. Len Downie of the Washington Post has opened the proceedings, talking about old media going on “a wild ride of discovery in this new media world.” In his speech, he talked about all the fears and myths surrounding new media and how these had

We’ve all heard of Flickr, Youtube and MySpace. They are, for now, the leading players in what is defined as social media. But if you ever wondered what exactly social media is and what to find out more, download this PDF e-book on social media by UK search engine marketing agency Spannerworks. It is a good primer to the world of social media, so dive in

A project at Northwestern University in the US is taking the idea of virtual news to a new level. The initiative, called News at Seven, does away with journalists, producers and presenters. Instead the news show is generated automatically. “Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation.” “Once it has assembled and edited its material, News

If you ever wondered how a converged newsroom might work, this article in Scotland’s Sunday Herald goes behind the scenes at the Financial Times. The FT has shuffled people and desks around to create the “UK’s first completely integrated newsroom”. “The concept is that we move to a much greater degree of integration between print and online,” says executive editor Hugh Carnegy. He explains there will now be single commissions