Are we being spoilt by having too much choice in a new media world? According to Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post, we are gorging ourselves on this feast, but missing the Ed Sullivan moments. By this he means a time when families across the US shared a new experience via the Ed Sullivan TV show, such as seeing The Beatles for the first time. Rather than take issue with

From The Guardian, the 100 most useful websites of the year. The list is an interesting mix of old and new, ranging from the BBC News website and The New York Times to Second Life and Basecamp. As the article says: “In 2004, the internet was a different place: there was, for example, no YouTube, and most Britons online didn’t have broadband. That’s changed dramatically: now, more than 75% of

All credit to PBS’s Mark Glaser for his blog entry on Time’s Person of the Year. Time might have been all excited about making “You” its Person of the Year. But as Glaser points out, the magazine itself is doing little to involve “You” in its journalism. Glaser writes: “There’s a feel of show to this praising of Time’s audience, without actually giving them any real power to make change

The BBC has published the service licences that bind the controllers of the BBC’s eight TV channels, 16 radio services, its website, interactive service and digital education service. The licences are set by the BBC Trust, the new independent body responsible for governing the corporation, and come into effect at the start of 2007. The online service licence makes for interesting reading. The phrasing implies that the Trust sees the

I have always had doubts about the purpose of offering a digital edition of a newspaper. By this, I mean a digital reproduction of the paper version. Why take something that is designed to be read as a physical paper product and turn it into an inferior reproduction on a computer screen? It seems that Canwest has no such doubts. It is now offering downloadable digital editions of 11 newspapers

The decision by Time magazine to name “You” as its Person of the Year is all over the internet. According to Time, You, the audience, public, whatever we call ourselves now, where the story of 2006: “It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about

Thanks to the CBC blog for alerting us to the release of the CRTC report on the future environment for broadcasting in Canada. According to the report, available in full here, the Canadian broadcasting system has yet to feel the impact of new media. “The record of this proceeding confirms that Canadians’ use of new audio-visual technologies continues to grow significantly and, for younger Canadians in particular, represents a shift

The folks behind Wikipedia are applying taken their open-source approach to knowledge to news. They have set up Openserving, offering a free, collaborative news blog. “We think it’s going to be like Time-Warner – today’s news, today’s opinion,” CEO Gil Penchina told Journalism.co.uk. From the official news release: “Wikia’s OpenServing extends the essence of the open source model – free software and content – to all aspects of web-based computing.

The issue of the manipulation of images has become far more pressing in a digital age. In August it caused red faces at Reuters, when it emerged that a photo of the bombing of Lebanon had been doctored. The photographer in question, Adnan Hajj, was fired and all the 920 images he had taken were recalled by Reuters. But the damage was done and the global reputation of the news

There has been a flurry of debate on whether the launch of Yahoo’s citizen journalism portal, You Witness news spells the end for the professional photojournalist. No one can deny that some of the most compelling recent news images were taken by amateurs on mobile phones, such as from the London Tube bombings. For the perspective from a professional on the rise of ‘phonajournalism : “Aesthetics don’t seem to matter