This is off-topic but I stumbled across this smart mash-up on Apple’s iconic 1984 Mac ad on the unofficial Apple Weblog. Instead of Big Brother, we get Hillary Clinton. And who is fighting against the Clinton ‘hegemony’, supporters of Barack Obama. The video has been watched more than 750,000 times on YouTube

Many journalists are wary of blogs. The usual complaint is that there are millions of blogs out there and most of there are catering for an audience of one. But this misses the point of how the blogging format can be used in journalism. I recently suggested to the Knight New Media Center at USC Annenberg that it should use a blog to cover a conference on science journalism online.

A new report by Nielsen on video game consoles is a must read for anyone working in the media. Nielsen’s “The State of the Console” report offers a startling insight into the the impact of games. It found that a console sitting by the TV in more than 45 million homes in the US. The PlayStation or Xbox is eating into TV’s audience. Nielsen found that people are playing games

One of the more surprising aspects to come out of the Knight New Media Center conference on science journalism has been the blog maintained by some of the students. Students taking a course in science writing at USC have sat in on the discussions and written up their impressions using a blog format, as opposed to writing traditional news stories. The blog was an attempt to try something new. Director

The messy nature of the internet is proving a hard concept for some of the veteran science journalists at the Knight New Media Center’s workshop on science journalism. One issue that was raised during the morning sessions was how people stumble across science news. The argument goes that in print, readers would come across science stories by chance as they flicked through the paper. But online, do you remove this

This year’s State of the Media report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism is out. It is an in-depth report card on the US media across print, broadcast and internet. There is a wealth of information here to read and process. One snippet in the online section about video caught my eye. It looks at video online, something many news organisations are rushing into offering on their websites. YouTube

This week I’m in Los Angeles for a series of workshops on science journalism, organised by the Knight New Media Center at the University of Southern California. The focus for this event is reporting science on the web. The aim is to come up with best practices for covering science online. Things kicked off Sunday night with dinner and a speech by Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science. Among the topics

Often the debate at conferences about the internet’s impact on the media end up sounding pretty similar. It is all about how the internet is destroying/saving (choose your side) journalism. From Jemima Kiss’s coverage of the Online Publishers’ Association Forum in London, it seems that the song remains the same. Writing about a spat over blogs and mainstream media between Jeff Jarvis and the New York Times’ Martin Nisenholtz, Kiss

The UK newspaper, The Guardian, is a prime example of how a traditional print media group is trying to evolve for a digital age. Its senior executives offered an insight into the plans for its shift from print to web at the Online Publishers’ Association Forum in London. At the core, is a £15m investment in its websites over the next 18 months. Its sites are looking dated so this

It was a wet and cold night but “iconoclast of the blogosphere“, Cory Doctorow, packed out a hall at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus in Vancouver on Thursday evening. Cory is somewhat of a net celebrity, perhaps best known for his immensely popular blog, BoingBoing. For his talk, Cory took on his mantle as electronic freedom fighter to speak out about our drift towards a surveillance society. As he rallied