For all the hype about citizen journalism, it seems that Americans would rather watch a traditional TV news report than video shot by the public. At least that is the finding of a poll into internet attitudes by Zogby International for a Washington firm, 463 Communications. The problem with surveys like this is that questions are phrased as an “either or” question. When it comes to video of news events,

First a confession. I am fairly new to blogging. It is one of those things that I dabbled in but never did as part of my previous job as a BBC journalist. Until my boss asked me to blog the 2006 We Media conference in London. Reporting on an event like this via a BBC blog was an eye-opener. Suddenly I was a reporter, commentator and pundit all at once.

The BBC News website is widely regarded as one of the best in the world. (As one of its founding members, I would say that too). But who would have guessed that it is also one of the best places to get the latest news on hamsters. This nine-year retrospective lists classics such as “Hamster back from the dead” to “Hamster survives giant shredder” to “Bus company says sorry to

With online advertising on the rise, newspapers are increasingly trying to grab a slice with their news websites. As Red Herring points, newspapers have a lot of ground to make up. For my money, this is the best quote in the piece, by industry consultant Gordon Burrell: “For newspapers, their aggressive approach to the Internet will only slow the overall deterioration of the company. It really depends on whether the

The big just keep getting bigger. Hot on the heals of the Bell GlobeMedia/CTV deal comes another one. This time is it CanWest Global swallowing up Alliance Atlantis in a CDN $2.3 billion bonanza. For the money, CanWest gets its hands on many of Canada’s most-watched specialty television channels, such as History TV and the Food Channel. The financial details are complicated, involving investment bank Goldman Sachs. The upshot is

Lots of excitement among Macheads after the long awaited unveiling of Apple’s iPhone. The specs are pretty impressive. Running a version of Apple OS X operating system, it is 1.16 cm thick and has a 3.5″ widescreen touchscreen display. It comes with 4GB or 8GB of memory and connectivity goodness in the shape of Bluetooth and wi-fi. It looks like a lovely piece of kit, if you have $499 for

A commentary at the Online Journalism Review highlights one of the big issues of 2006 and looks forward to putting it behind us in 2007. It is about the divisive debate between “mainstream” and “citizen” journalism. One does not preclude the other. From the column: “‘Citizen journalism’ provides professional reporters the chance to collect many more data points than they can on their own. And ‘mainstream media’ provide readers an