Google has taken a major step into becoming a publisher of news. It is now hosting news stories on its Google News site, rather than just linking to the websites with the material. The deal covers five major news services: AP, Agence France-Presse, the UK Press Association and the Canadian Press. Here’s an example of what a CP story looks like on Google. It is very simple and clear, with

As a respite to all the recent exchange of verbal blows over blogging and journalism, this is a refreshing op-ed in The Guardian from co-founder of Salon.com Scott Rosenberg. He avoid getting into a fruitless debate about whether blogging is journalism and instead talks about how “from the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable”. Most journalists’ understanding of the nature

If you want to get an idea of skills journalists should be learning, check out Mindy McAdams’ new course at Florida, Journalists’ Toolkit. Over two terms, the course will look at how to use audio, audio slideshows and blogs in journalism, and later focus on video and other motion visuals. This is the sort of training that should be happening in newsrooms across the world, as journalists move beyond the

Off for a week’s holiday. Normal service will be resumed on Monday 27 August. Thanks

Some visitors to the BBC News website will have noticed a little box appearing at the bottom of stories with a range of social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit. With a simple click of a button, you can now share a BBC story with your friends. It explains, for one, why so many BBC stories are appearing on my friends’ pages in Facebook. Writing on the BBC Editors’

At last week’s AEJMC convention in Washington DC, New York University professor Jay Rosen talked about the philosophy behind his influential blog PressThink. Rosen explained how blogging was ideal for the diffusion of ideas as you can, in his words, “etch yourself into the memory of the web”. What he means is that, for example, when you run a Google search for the words Eason Jordan, the second listing is

The list of 12 tips for creating an online community produced by the Knight Citizen News Network is a worthwhile read. It hopes to help anyone struggling to keep their online community civil, constructive and lively. Among the tips is: The “if you build it, they will come” approach to online community rarely produces good results. Most people don’t want to be the first one to strike up a public

One of the more interesting speakers at last week’s annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication was Dan Gillmor. During a panel on citizen media, he talked about the need to accept failure as a learning process. Gillmor is speaking from experience, having being behind the failed Bayosphere site

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference brings together academics from all over the US and beyond to present research, discuss trends and network with colleagues. The hotel lobby is full of people with laptops, as the wifi is free there but paid for in the rooms. But as J D Lasica found out, you’d be hard pressed to find out what people are saying at

I’m at the AEJMC conference in Washington DC this week. This is the time of year when educators in journalism and mass communication get together to present papers, share experiences and generally discuss the state of education. With simultaneous panels taking place back to back, there is little time to report back on the sessions in detail. So I wanted to highlight the best thing I heard today, during a