The second keynote of the ISOJ was by Meredith Artley, vice president and managing editor, CNN.com She started by stressing the importance of journalism and showed dramatic images of the aftermath of the disaster in Japan. Like for other news organisations, Japan has proved a major draw for CNN. In the 10 days since the Japan quake on March 11, CNN had: 75 million average page views per day on PC

For the January edition of UBC Reports, entitled The Next Big Thing, I was one of the UBC researchers asked to look ahead to trends for the coming years. My contribution considers the potential of collaborative story-telling via social media tools such as Twitter, where we tell stories together, one tweet at a time. Journalism surrounds us. Much of it is, literally, ambient, and being produced by professionals and citizens

I recently took part in a stimulating panel discussion on crowdsourcing organised by Fresh Media. The event held in Vancouver on October 6 brought together media, art and technology, with Leigh Christie (executive director and co-founder of the eatART foundation), David Ascher (CEO of Mozilla Messaging) and myself on the panel. For those who couldn’t make it, here is the text of my opening remarks. I want to start by talking

My latest post for PBS Mediashift looks at how participatory media tools such as CoveritLive can be used in the classroom. One of the challenges, particularly in large undergraduate classes, is turning the traditional academic lecture into more of a conversation. Rather than simply being empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, I wanted to try out new ways for students to collaborate on distilling and creating knowledge. The aim

Spot.us, the community funded reporting experiment funded by the Knight Foundation, has officially launched. The idea behind the site is simple – provide a marketplace for news organisations, reporters and citizens to work together. A reporter can pitch a story which would be funded by tips from the public. The creator of the site, David Cohn, sees this as a new way to fund local journalism. Currently the site is

Image via Wikipedia There are just a couple of days left to get in your Knight News Challenge proposal. The deadline to apply for a slice of the $5m up for grabs is November 1 at midnight PDT. On Wednesday, I submitted my idea – Legacy2010.com: Helping Vancouver citizens understand how the Winter Olympics are changing the city. The 2010 Winter Games are a source of controversy in Vancouver. Supporters

The crowd-powered site NowPublic.com, in partnership with the Vancouver Sun, has published its fourth MostPublic Index which identifies the web’s 20 most visible individuals in Vancouver. I was pleased to find myself on the list at number 13, as well as my colleague at the UBC J-school, adjunct professor David Beers at 19, and my friend Travis Smith at 16. The list is a veritable who’s who of new media

Kate Marymont, vice president of Information Center Content at Gannett, talks about her vision of reader-driven investigative journalism: (Shot on a Nokia N95)

CNN is taking its approach to citizen journalism one step further by setting up iReport.com as a dedicated citizen media site. Like many other mainstream media outlets, CNN has had to cope with far more submissions from the audience than it could process and publish. Only around 10% of the 100,000 photos and videos sent to CNN have been posted since the launch its citizen journalism project in August 2006

A couple of days ago, the University of British Columbia campus was under lockdown following a threat against students in the Bio Sciences building. I was on campus at the time and, like others here, wanted to find out more. One of the best sources turned out to be not mainstream media, but the citizen media site, NowPublic.com. One of its contributors, ScienceDave, happened to be in the building at