From Friday, Canadians will be told that newspapers are worth it, in a CAD $10 million awareness and marketing campaign. The Canadian Newspaper Association is behind the three-month campaign to remind the public of the role of newspapers as champions of the public interest. The ads are intended to counteract the impression that the Internet and electronic media are pushing print out of fashion. The Canadian newspaper industry argues that

You probably haven’t been able to avoid the mass coverage in the media of the release of Microsoft’s Halo 3 video game. But sometimes the mainstream media gets it wrong, like in this TV report from the BBC where it used footage from Sony’s Killzone 2 by mistake. I’ve worked with the reporter on the story, Rory Cellan-Jones, and he is a good journalist. To his credit, Rory has apologised

Lists are always popular online, but this one by Paul Bradshaw on how to be a journalism student is useful too. Top of the list is “Read the news.” This echoes what we tell our students at the UBC School of Journalism. As an incentive, we test the students on their knowledge of current affairs in a weekly news quiz, which is run more as a TV game show than

Last week’s Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff didn’t generate as much online coverage as similar conventions tend to do in the US. One of the few people providing updates was Paul Bradshaw via Twitter alerts. But then, there is only so much you can get into 140 words. He did write a piece for the UK Press Gazette, picking up on two of the presentations. The original draft of

One of the pressing issues for the news industry is training. Many journalists simply do not have the skills needed in an Internet age, so the Knight Foundation is investing more than US$6 million in preparing reporters and editors for a digital world. The money is going to the Knight Digital Media Center, based at two universities in Los Angeles. $2.8 million is going to the University of California, Berkeley

TechPresident for scooping the US$10,000 Grand Prize in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. The site tracks how the 2008 US presidential candidates are using the web, but also how content generated by voters such as YouTube videos of Flickr photos, is affecting the campaign. It is noteworthy that the top award for innovation went to a non-traditional news outlet. TechPresident, together with the other winners, “gave the judges

A key skill for journalists in an Internet age is knowing how to evaluate online news sources. This was part of the focus of this week’s class in multiplatform journalism at the UBC School of Journalism. There are five criteria to consider: Authority: Who created the site, why, and what are their credentials? Who published it and why? Do they have any affiliations? Objectivity: Does the site express any opinions

Here is a list of essential online tools for journalists that I’ve handed out to my multiplatform journalism students at the University of British Columbia: RSS software Macs: NetNewsWire (Free and paid for version, US$29.95, available) Shrook (free) Windows: FeedDemon (Paid for US$29.95) FeedReader (Free) Sharpreader (Free) Online RSS feed readers Google Reader Netvibes Bloglines Personalized news pages MyYahoo iGoogle Blog aggregators: Technorati Icerocket BlogPulse News alerts: Google Alerts Yahoo

The Future of Newspapers conference is taking place in Cardiff over the next couple of days. It started with a keynote by former Guardian editor Peter Preston, which is available in video. Unfortunately the rest of the conference isn’t being webcast. Looking around the web, there seems to be little coverage of the first day’s events. Paul Bradshaw is Twittering the conference, but 140-character summaries of 8,000 word research papers

The head of the press watchdog in the UK has come up with an odd way to deal with the issue of trust online. Sir Christopher Meyer, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) has called for a digital kitemark for news sites, because there is a “crying need to be able to distinguish between what is rubbish and what is quality, between what is fantasy and what reliable”. Sir