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Many turn to internet for Sri Lanka war news By KRISHAN FRANCIS - 11 hours ago COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - With mainstream journalists barred from Sri Lanka's war zone, Tamil expatriates desperate for news of loved ones have turned to small Web sites for reports and video from across the front lines. Much of their reporting comes from locals - some of them former journalists and aid workers - who are working anonymously in the war zone and e-mailing their reports to editors in Europe. Para Prabha said his London-based Euro Television Web site receives clips from about six reporters and cameramen working inside the war zone under dangerous circumstances. The site is devoted to issues related to Sri Lanka's Tamils and the government's offensive against the Tamil Tiger rebels. "One of our reporters was killed in February, caught in artillery fire, and a lot of other colleagues have left us because it's too dangerous," Prabha said. Another Web site, War Without Witness, uses aid workers on the ground to film footage, according to one official from the site who would identify himself only as Sam. He would not name the groups helping him, fearing reprisals from the government.

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Here's the second of our videos from inside the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., where they're envisioning how news will be consumed in two to ten years. (You can catch up on the series here.) Some of the goodies you'll notice: a Samsung tablet, an iPhone, a Sony Bravia TV, and an application called CustomTimes that they've developed to work on all three devices. The R&D group is obsessed with the ability to seamlessly transition among web-enabled gadgets. They're not convinced that the future will land on a single, multipurpose contraption - like some sort of Kindle meets Chumby meets Minority Report. Instead, they predict consumers will connect to the Internet through their cars, on their televisions, over mobile networks, and in traditional browsers, while expecting those devices to interact and sync with each other.

'Meta-reading': the generational differences in consuming news May 13th, 2009Posted by Judith Townend in Events, Online Journalism, Social media and blogging Turi Munthe, CEO and founder of the citizen journalism site, Demotix, shared an interesting thought with participants of the Voices Online Blogging Conference on Monday. The young Demotix interns consume news differently from the way he does. He elaborated to Journalism.co.uk after the panel. 'Meta-reading': "There is a generational split, but not in the way everyone imagines. It's much more recent than that," he said. People only ten years younger - he is in his 30s - consume news differently from the way he does, Munthe told Journalism.co.uk. The interns in the office ('who play a hugely important role: they're regional editors and they get properly stuck into what we do') read slightly differently, he said. "They are getting the Twitter feeds, and the blog posts, and the Facebook messaging and the free papers, and everything else, and are very happy with it. Much more happy with it than I am." "Essentially, they process information differently. It's a 'meta-reading'. It's not about individual brands. They are fully aware of all the back-stories of all the stories they're getting," he says. It's a 'degree of sophistication,' he said, 'which reads the interests behind the news as an integral part of the news'.

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This is the official website for the documentary film The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club, directed by Dan Krauss. The film was formerly titled The Life of Kevin Carter

Multimedia journalism teaching: 10 things I learned One way to teach multimedia reporting skills (by which I mean use of the reporting tools, not HTML and scripting) is to have an intense, short boot camp. Three days, five days maybe, with long hours each day. Another option is to integrate the skills into a full 3-credit course - call it "multimedia reporting," or just change the existing Reporting 101 course to include the current tools. I like both of those options, but this semester I tried a third option: Students enrolled in the regular 3-credit reporting course could take an additional 1-credit course in multimedia reporting. They were permitted to enroll only if they were also taking the reporting course. (They have previously completed a 3-credit mass media writing course.)

It's an anxious time to be graduating from journalism school. The economy is in the tank and newsrooms are being decimated. But yet, it is also a great time to be a journalist, with more news and information available than ever before and more ways than ever to reach audiences. At the recent International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, I asked a range of professionals what advice they had for journalism graduates entering the job market. There was broad agreement that students should leave journalism school being able to work across print, broadcast and online. At the very least, they should understand the new tools available to reporters and be continually learning. As one professional said, school is just the beginning of learning. At the core is good writing and reporting, regardless of the medium. But to stand out from the crowd, journalism graduates should follow their passions, develop an area of specialization and master that area.

"The Passion of Walker Evans" By: Daniel Mark Epstein, New Criterion, March 1, 2000 America's infatuation with photography has thrived upon its easy accessibility. By 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, George Eastman had made the roll-film camera so cheap that soon no family reunion or Sunday picnic need ever lack a "photo artist" to immortalize it. Amateur camera societies and photo exhibitions sprang up in cities and towns from coast to coast. And while professionals like Alfred Stieglitz fought for "the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression," arguing that the photographer's gift, like the painter's, was privileged vision, the larger public remained quite content with the belief that one person's photo was pretty much as good as another's.

The ethical and real hazards of citizen journalism People powered People powered Who is responsible for the risks taken by citizen journalists who become 'accidental' reporters in dangerous situations? This was the excellent question asked by Slawek Kozdras, a Polish student, who was in the audience when I gave a talk at Cumberland Lodge to LSE Government scholars. I was doing my usual schtick about how networked journalism could alter the terms of the political communications trade. I put up slides about activists in Burma, G20 protestors and other people using new media technologies to report where professional journalists can't go. Slawek made a good point drawn from a fellow eastern European's work: "I remember a story told in Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. After the Soviet army stormed into Prague in 1968 the brave Czech people (as opposed to cowardly Czech politicians) were mocking the army, women were teasing with Russian soldiers, laughing at them, taking pictures with them knowing the Russians can't react. The paradox is that later on these pictures with people mocking Russians turned against the Czechs and served as evidence in trials."

Searching By Looking Elsewhere Published May 11, 2009 BBC , Data , Infoskills , SEO , Search 4 Comments A couple of weeks or so ago, I got an email requesting a link to something I'd spoken about at a department meeting some time ago (the Gartner hype cycle, actually). Now normally I'd check my delicious bookmarks for a good link, or maybe even run a Google web search, but instead I ran a search for 'gartner hypecycle 2008′ on Google Images… …which is when it struck me that searching Google Images may on occasion lead to better quality, or more relevant, results than doing a normal web search, particularly if you use a level of indirection. In particular, it can often lead to a web document or post that provides some sort of analysis around a topic. (Remember, Google image search links to the web pages that contain the images that are displayed in the image search results, not just the images.)

Introduction Here follows the lecture prompts for part I of my 2008/9 lectures on Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR). For part II on sources - see here. Because of the speed at which new initiatives (and relevant research examples) come and go in this field, I'll be adding updates on this post from time to time. But to stay fully up to date with developments, keep an eye on my blog and website. Computer Assisted Research (CAR): why? * Once research was the domain of librarians and researchers - not anymore. * Rapid developments in online technologies; contributor finding, fact-checking, current awareness, multimedia. * Changes in the news landscape (fragmentation of market and 'efficiency drives'). * Journalists must now do all their own research.