New Media Unit

In online polling about story selection, editors at the Wisconsin State Journal learn that 'the readers who vote consistently do choose weighty stories.'

But it's not just news organizations and individual journalists doing that. You can also find noteworthy coverage on Tumblr's Egypt page. It's a real-time example of Tumblr's curated tag pages, a new feature the company rolled out about a month ago. The feature lets a group of editors (Tumblr users) select the choicest cuts from their feeds for public consumption. The pages originally broke down into areas like fashion, design, long reads, and a general news page. The Egypt page is a step beyond that, an on-the-fly means of developing a news channel from the minds and links of users. With no overriding editorial "vision," at least in the traditional sense, what you get is a collection of breaking updates, stories providing desperately needed context, and, naturally, one of the things Tumblr is best at: photos.

What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk.

Become part of the Public Insight Network and join 90,000 people like you who help improve, deepen and diversify reporting at American Public Media and our partner newsrooms. We'll ask you to share your observations, insights and experience. We then pass on your information to reporters and editors who may follow up with a request for more information, or perhaps an interview. Or, with your permission, they may post your insights directly to the web. It's a great way to share what you know. So open up. And add your insight to the news coverage that millions of people count on every day.

An optimistic look at where the news might go in the future.

Jeff Jarvis video on Citizen Journalism

Slide show on social media in journalism

Here's a quick example of how social networks aid in the newsgathering process.

In this video, I show you how I go about using Twitter for journalism. Twiter has become a very important reporting tool for many journalists, because of its crowd sourcing and search capabilities.

To close out 2010, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2011 will bring for the future of journalism.

When it comes to the news of the day, newspapers, websites, bloggers, cable networks and aggregators all trip over themselves to be the fastest and the first. The competition has always existed, but technology has ramped up the rivalries. At this increasingly accelerated pace, is it inevitable that noteworthy events - and the news they engender - will rush lickety-split into each other? What happens when things just cannot occur any faster? What if the rapidity of the newscycle outpaces the news itself and we wind up in some form of warp speed - living life in a wormholish, time-wrinkled world?

In the two years since our site has launched, we've funded over 160 projects with the help of 5,000 contributors, a fifth of whom contributed more than once. We've done this in collaboration with 95 organizations, and our reporting projects have won eight journalism awards. In short, we're making a difference. Whether it's funding FOIA requests, exposing the lies of a sheriff, or providing a deeper understanding of those less fortunate in our society, the stories we fund make a difference. I earnestly believe in the power of an informed democracy. The guiding principle at Spot.Us is to make the process of journalism more transparent and participatory -- not merely to inform but to engage. Our site is a testament to the notion that people can take ownership over their information needs if there is a platform to support it.

This article provides examples of giving a voice to people that usually don't have one. It shows how people can give their input on a story.

FirstPerson is MSNBC's citizen Journalism outlet. 

First Person MSNBC is an open forum for anyone to post their stories. You don't have to be a professional writer, you can post whatever you want. Every week their topics change for what they would want to be posted but you can post whatever you would like.

The Courier-News' Citizen Journalism venture

GETPUBLISHED by mycentraljersey is an open forum for non professional writers to submit anything they'd like to share. They have guidelines, but you can submit anything you write.

Google has been experimenting with personalizing Google News, and MediaPost got a look at the proposed layout Friday. The Mountain View, Calif. search engine has been running tests on the design of Google News for the past several months.

In this article, we will cover the personalized content approach and in particular reddit. We will describe the technical details and compare existing personalized content solutions.

I'm trying to show you that Twitter is a growing tool that student media should be using. After all, our readers are online and living in the social networking world. Instead of fighting that, we need to embrace it. Go to your readers. Don't make them come to you.

Among the major sectors, only newspapers suffered continued revenue declines last year-an unmistakable sign that the structural economic problems facing newspapers are more severe than those of other media. When the final tallies are in, we estimate 1,000 to 1,500 more newsroom jobs will have been lost-meaning newspaper newsrooms are 30% smaller than in 2000. Beneath all this, however, a more fundamental challenge to journalism became clearer in the last year. The biggest issue ahead may not be lack of audience or even lack of new revenue experiments. It may be that in the digital realm the news industry is no longer in control of its own future. News organizations-old and new-still produce most of the content audiences consume. But each technological advance has added a new layer of complexity-and a new set of players-in connecting that content to consumers and advertisers. In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads. They depend on aggregators (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) to bring them a substantial portion of their audience. And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content. Each new platform often requires a new software program. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.

Which media sectors thrived in 2010? Which ones faltered? How has technology changed how people get their news? Test your knowledge about the news industry with this quiz from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Questions are based on PEJ's State of the News Media 2011 report.

Not having a draconian Twitter policy has helped The New York Times thrive, according to a panel of reporters speaking at an Online News Association event in New York. The panelists said they use the social media platform for a variety of pretty common reasons: breaking news, garnering pageviews, connecting with readers and reinforcing the brand.