The Committee to Project Journalists highlights a worrying trend in its report on press freedom across the world. It says that the internet has fueled a growth in the number of jailed journalists. It found that 134 journalists were behind bars on December 1, up by nine from the previous year. More significantly, it found that one in three is now an Internet blogger, online editor, or web-based reporter. Abi

What happens when a news editor questions the immediacy of the web and the value of a 24-hour news desk? You spark off a reaction, documented at length at CJR Daily. The fuse was lit by journalist/Silicon Valley CEO Alan D Mutter who dared to write on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur: “The 24-hour online news desk is the worst idea for newspapers since publishers foolishly decided 10 years

The BBC News website has a report on a project it ran with a school in London. BBC journalists helped the teenagers at Lilian Baylis Technology School in Lambeth, use their cell phones as news-gathering tools. The pupils took photos and recorded interviews on the phones, sending the results by Bluetooth to laptops. The radio pieces were edited together using Garageband. What is interesting about this experiment is that the

For all of you who thought Britney Spears was old news, think again. According to Yahoo’s top searches of 2006, we just could not get enough of her over the past 12 months. She is the most search for term for the year. The rest of the top 10 reveal our obsession with celebrity, with Shakira, Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton all up there. But over here in Canada, the

Interesting read in the Washington Post on how US newspaper chain Gannett is trying to reinvent itself. From the article: “Losing readers and revenue to the Internet and other media, newspapers are struggling to stay relevant and even afloat. Gannett’s answer is radical. The chain’s papers are redirecting their newsrooms to focus on the Web first, paper second. Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up “hyper-local,” street-by-street

CBC is going to start an experiment with what it calls civic journalism. It comes in response to declining audiences for its evening news show, Canada Now. It seems that CBC has realised that local news needs to be local and involve the community. According to a CBC report on this: “The Vancouver bureau of the public broadcaster will lead an experiment in strengthening local newscasts on both radio and

I should plug the website my students have put together in just over a month. As part of the multiplatform journalism course, the students had to come up with a multimedia project based on the theme of digital Vancouver. Parallel to the journalism, we were installing a new content management system, called Typo3, and building the site from the ground up. We finally had everything up and running on Thursday.