The following is part of a chapter for a forthcoming book on online journalism. Contributions welcome.

Maps have become a familiar part of the news language online due to a number of advantages:

• They provide an easy way to grasp a story at a glance
• They allow users to drill down to relevant information local to them very quickly
• Maps can be created very easily, and added to relatively easily by non-journalists
• Maps draw on structured data, making them a very useful way to present data such as schools tables, crime statistics or petrol prices
• They can be automated, updating in response to real-time information

News organisations have used maps in a number of ways:

Mapping public data

In the US there has been a rich history of mapping crime statistics online, stimulated enormously by Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org, which he later developed into EveryBlock, a website which doesn’t just map crime – but also planning and liquor applications, filming, news stories, street closures and restaurant inspections. EveryBlock pulls in information from a range of sources and displays the results based on the zip code you enter, giving you a picture of everything happening local to you.

In the UK the most significant mapping of public data has been around elections. The Telegraph election maps, for example, pull from a database to provide links to specific statistics and reports. The BBC, meanwhile, have provided maps that you could change based on your own prediction of the ‘swing’ a political party might experience.

More recently, however, as there has been an increasing move towards publishing public data and increasing use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain public data, types of data have broadened.

Working with the public

When a number of motorists started reported problems with their cars, the BBC was able to gather data from viewers and website visitors to compile a map of cases richer than any motoring organisation or transport department. That data allowed them to pinpoint the particular petrol stations where contaminated fuel was being supplied. During floods in Berkshire BBC Radio Berkshire also used maps to show the worst affected areas, and what people were saying, along with data about emergency services.

On a regional level the Manchester Evening News plots information about congestion and roadworks on its travel map; and the Hartlepool Mail has used its readers’ contributions to map pot holes and derelict areas of the town. On the less serious side, newspapers have used maps for sightings of an unusual bird, to identify where readers are living around the globe, and to map sightings of unidentified flying objects.

Increasingly news organisations are providing raw data to users for them to create their own maps. The Guardian, for example, provided travel expenses data for MPs for users to analyse. Tony Hirst, publisher of the blog OUseful, visualised that data on a map in a way that made it easy to tell at a glance which MPs were claiming more for travel than other MPs who lived nearby. The newspaper has a Datablog which regularly releases data for users to visualise in different ways (The Times also have one, called Times Labs Blog, which at the time of writing did not release data; the New York Times does release data in its Visualization Lab).

Maps and mashups

Maps work particularly well when combined with another service that includes geospatial data – for instance, latitude and longitude, or a postcode or placename. During the US election a number of these ‘mashups’ appeared showing, for example, Twitter tweets or YouTube videos about the election displayed on a map. During the Beijing Olympics BBC Sport used similar technology to display tweets, blog posts and photos on a map of the Olympic village.

Image maps

In addition to traditional cartographic maps, it is possible to use images of anything as a ‘map’ that you navigate in the same way with your mouse, clicking on particular areas to bring up relevant detail. Examples have included the route of a race or river, a building’s floorplan, a timeline, line or bar chart, or even a group photo. In one excellent example, NPR took a picture of health lobbyists attending the hearing of a new health bill. Users could click on individual people to find out more about them – and were also invited to identify others in the picture. Similarly, The Guardian’s Interactives section often includes diagrams where you can roll over different areas to find out information about different aspects of the process or story.

A few years ago you needed to have skills in Flash or Dreamweaver to create an image map. However, a number of web-based tools (e.g. Vuvox and FineTuna) have since been launched that allow you to create these more easily.

Geotagging and the semantic web

Both the rise in mapping and a rise in people accessing news on mobile phones has created a demand for ‘geotagged’ (or geocoded) news. Geotagging a news article means adding geographical information to it – usually, latitude and longitude – in a way that makes it easy for search engines and news distribution platforms to understand what area that news article refers to.

In practice this means that if you are on a mobile phone with GPS technology you can search for ‘restaurant reviews near me’ or ‘crime stories near me’. Likewise, if you were looking for a new house you could easily find stories about the local schools, or plans for new buildings. Many search engines take into account the searcher’s own location when bringing up search results – so including geotagging in news stories would also increase the likelihood of your content being found by a local searcher.

Most news organisations are exploring geotagging in some capacity – in many cases, changing their content management systems so that journalists can add such information when publishing a story. Some have used this information to launch ‘hyperlocal’ parts of their news websites that allow users to read stories specifically about a particular postcode.

At the same time, organisations like Reuters have developed technologies that add geolocation data to stories after they have been written – using semantic web technology to look for place names in the article text and disambiguate them, understanding that the ‘Birmingham’ referred to is the UK’s second city and not the place of the same name in Alabama, US.

The weakness of the latter approach is that it can only work on the information contained in the article, which may not be specific enough. Meanwhile, journalists geotagging their own articles need to be aware of the privacy and legal implications in, for example, identifying the specific house that a criminal lives in. Normally postcodes in the UK are vague enough for this not to happen – while licensing arrangements mean that Google Maps’ mapping of UK postcodes varies in accuracy.

How to involve users in mapping

There are 3 broad approaches to mapping contributions from users. The first is to process every contribution manually – taking emails, phonecalls, comments and texts and entering them into the map yourself. This has clear advantages in being able to verify the information and keep the map working properly, but obvious disadvantages in the amount of time it requires for a journalist and how long it takes for the map to be updated.

A second approach is to publish the map in editable format – that is, allow anyone to edit the map directly. This obviously has the advantage of not requiring any further work from the journalist other than checking the map regularly and correcting any mistakes. However, it does require a certain level of technical competence from users, and if you’re editing a Google Map, which doesn’t yet have any granularity of control, you will find users accidentally editing each others’ entries and the title of the map itself.

The third approach is to part-automate the process in a way that addresses the weaknesses above. You can, for example, set up a Google Map so that it displays data from a Google spreadsheet. Publishing that spreadsheet and allowing users to edit it will likely result in more contributions, fewer errors, and easier correction (if anyone vandalises the spreadsheet you can easily ‘revert’ to previous versions). You can also create a Google Form for that spreadsheet, which you can publish on a website for users to fill in by answering a few questions. This makes it even easier for users to enter information and prevents them editing others’ – although it may mean duplicate entries from different people entering the same information.

Have I left any considerations or concepts out? Any great examples that deserve highlighting? Let me know

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Reuters recently published a report entitled: ‘What’s Happening to Our News: An investigation into the likely impact of the digital revolution on the economics of news publishing in the UK‘. In it author Andrew Currah provides an overview of the situation facing UK publishers, and 3 broad suggestions as to ways forward – namely, kitemarks, public support, and digital literacy education.

The kitemark idea seems to have stirred up the most fuss. In the first of a series of email exchanges I asked Currah how he saw this making any difference to consumption of newspapers, and how it could work in practice. This is his response:

Yes, the kitemark idea has triggered quite a response… Unfortunately, as the discussion online suggests, the term has implied to many a top-down, centralised system of certification which would lead to some form of
‘apartheid’ between bloggers and journalists.

That was certainly not our intended message. The report simply wanted to foreground the idea of digital labelling as a means of improving transparency in online news coverage.

All we meant by a kitemark was a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.

Our report only touched upon this project of labelling, which the Media Standards Trust are busy working on. For a more detailed discussion, see the post by Martin Moore or read about the related efforts of http://www.newscredit.org

So, in summary, we are in favour of an open source, voluntary, bottom-up system of tagging NOT an archaic, top-down system of certification dividing amateurs and professionals. We did not envision participation in such an initiative as a precursor to public funding – though intelligent labelling and linking to external sites could, for example, be far more developed at the BBC.

In terms of value, by intelligently labelling the news all sorts of valuable derivative uses might be enabled (e.g. helping users to filter content by criteria or triangulate stories). It might also help to avoid the failures of purely algorithmic search approaches to news (e.g. the fiasco surrounding the publication of an outdated United Airlines story on Google News in August last year – triggered, in part, due to the lack of any embedded metadata about the story’s publication date):

Is this similar to the ideas that Tim Berners- Lee is working on in his Knight-funded project?

Yes – absolutely. This is something we only briefly touch in the report. We’re hoping to spend more time looking at this approach in follow-on research. I think the initiative being developed by Tim Berners-Lee and the Media Standards Trust has a great chance of improving transparency, especially when tagging and labelling technologies are seamlessly integrated into the workflow of the newsroom.

I can see how something around metadata could help users find original journalism, but how do you see this kitemark keeping journalism alive in a business sense?

Whether this would realistically boost the economics of news is difficult to answer. But on the basis of our research, it seems that a more transparent, systematic way of tagging the news could help publishers in a variety of ways…

For example, by developing a more comprehensive network of tags connecting stories, themes and content that might, in theory, keep people on a site for longer – in turn, strengthening ad revenues. It might also perpetuate the value and profile of a story long after it was published.

Metadata is also the key to techniques such as search engine optimisation, social media marketing, and the like, all of which are about attracting more attention around the content for longer. It would also provide a system for displaying stories in new formats, such as digital maps.

When or whether all of this will translate into enough ad revenues to keep publishers afloat is an open question; investing in the systems and training to make this archival linking possible is another hurdle.

An alternative approach might be to buck the trend towards free by introducing new forms of online paid subscription, to provide access to a premium, searchable and fully digitized archive of all back content. Metadata would also be a key step in that direction.

The discussion continues in the comments

NB: The Freeman’s Journal has an excellent critical overview of the report, with responses from Currah in the comments.

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As a new semester begins it seems a good time to finally post about how my second year journalism degree students approached the ‘interactive’ element of their portfolio way back in May (yes, everything they do is interactive, but bear with me).

For the first time I gave them an open brief in terms of what they did interactively (in previous years I asked them to produce Flash interactives). Having been taught how to create everything from audio slideshows and image maps to multimedia interactives, Google Maps and Yahoo! Pipes mashups, I was curious to see what they would pick. Would they all plump for the same option?

Apparently not. In fact, the results are the most diverse and downright fascinating I’ve ever seen from an online journalism class.

Here’s what they did:

• Kasper Sorensen created

  a map of water issues stories in Europe

• Ashley Snape created a

  map of Environmental Activity in Australasia

• Natalie Chillington created a photo slideshow of the top ten endangered animals
• Alice Fanning not only created a

  map of UK environmental protests but also a Yahoo! Pipe mashup of eco news.

• Emma Foster created an audio slideshow – ‘Tescopoly’ – and a map of eco-businesses in the UK
• Hayley Smith created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup of environmental technology news, alerts and photos
• Kat Higgs created an audio slideshow about mistreatment of animals
• Stephanie Grant created an audio slideshow to mark African Liberation Day
• Stephen Nunes set up a YouTube channel and posted 3 mini-videos looking at how environmentally friendly his accommodation was; he also included links to full audio on many of his stories for the website
• Tuuli Platner stole the show with her YouTube video song promoting the site and her reporter blog. Journalists are becoming brands, and Tuuli has understood that brilliantly.

In addition the class submitted stories from their blogs and from the Environmental News Online website; their Twitter tweets and their bookmarks; their rss reader subscriptions and their comments on other blogs.

You could say I’m quite demanding like that.

What was interesting to see was students commenting on each others’ blogs about what they were planning to do – particularly useful when students were reporting on areas that crossed disciplines and other correspondents could see additional leads or angles.

In other words, the blogs became a team management and communication tool, as well as a publishing one.

Many students tried a number of things – a Pipes mashup; an audio slideshow – before settling on what they eventually submitted. They bookmarked, they twittered, and they blogged. They linked. They commented – one noted how her blog hits spiked after she posted a comment on another blog.

I was pretty pleased, all in. The vast scope of possibilities in online journalism is impossible to teach in ten weeks, so I tried to focus on broader issues: experimentation; possibilities. That gave them scope to latch onto what stimulated them, or what the story suited. I only hope they take it further as they begin their final year…

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This season, after years of loyalty to the BBC/Channel 4 fantasy football competition, I’ve switched to The Guardian’s. Their game takes advantage of the reams of player data now available to newspapers – not just goals scored, clean sheets and assists, but also clearances, interceptions, tackles, shots on target, and so on, making for a very different challenge indeed.

The move mirrors that made by The Telegraph a year ago when they introduced a Flash element to their match reports that allowed you to look at an incredible range of match statistics. As I wrote at the time: it’s like having your own ProZone.

What’s all this got to do with the future of news? This: data. It’s one of the few advantages that news organisations have, and they should be doing more with it. What the Guardian fantasy football and the Telegraph demonstrate is the flexibility of that data.

And if we can do it in sport, why aren’t we doing it more elsewhere? Schools tables, pollution records, crime data, geotagged information, and election results are just a few that spring to mind – can you add some more?

For a good example of a particularly creative use of data (again with a sport twist), see Channel 4′s alternative Olympics medals table, which matches medals results against various other country stats, such as human rights record.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to join my fantasy football friends’ league, search for Game 39 – or just post a comment below…

More database-related posts

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I’ve written before on just how important geotagging will be in preparing for a mobile future – well, now that mobile future is here:

“Apple’s newly unveiled second-generation iPhone includes a news service from the Associated Press which provides stories tailored to an individual user’s location.

“The application uses the phone’s in-built GPS (global positioning system) and serves stories based on the user’s immediate area.”

Now, what’s your excuse?

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Image by Sid05 via Flickr

This weekend’s tool-to-play-with is Yahoo! Pipes. Chances are you’ve heard of Yahoo! Pipes (it’s been around for over a year and I’ve blogged about it before) but if you’ve not played with it yet, now is the time to have a go.

Pipes is essentially a mashup tool, particularly useful for doing things with RSS feeds. And at its basic levels it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming language.

Here’s some examples of things I’ve done with it:

• Aggregated a number of RSS feeds into one
• Translated RSS feeds from other languages into English
• Filtered an RSS feed so that only entries with links come through (a custom search)

They were pretty easy, to be honest. More impressive are:

• Robin Hamman’s “UGC Finder” that aggregates and filters “the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites“
• Joanna Geary’s Pipe of West Midlands news from The Birmingham Post
• The Open University Pipe that converts Twitter tweets into audio.
• Various pipes that use mapping

One of the great features of Pipes is that you can ‘clone’ any other pipe. So if I like the look of Hamman’s UGC finder, I can clone it and tweak it to my own requirements, or add features on top. Hamman can see that and clone my improvements back.

It’s also searchable. See this search for ‘Birmingham’ to see some of the possibilities for local newsgathering and publishing.

A thorough explanation has been on my to-do list for far too long and now I’m looking for a virtual support group. So let me know: have you used Pipes? Do you know of other journalistic examples?

Or have a play and let me know how it goes.

Read other Something For The Weekend posts

Webpages about Yahoo! Pipes I’ve bookmarked

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Once again news organisations will be looking over their shoulder at the launch of MetaCarta’s news mapping service. The more I play with this, the better I like it.

The red page icons on the opening page are something of a red herring – those are just the main headlines. A search for “Birmingham” brings up a whole lot more from my home town (and interestingly, not Birmingham, Alabama, meaning the site has worked out where I am).

Perhaps more interestingly, a keyword search gives you a global picture of what’s going on with, say news on the “environment”. How else would I have discovered a story about logging in Indonesia?

You can combine places with keywords, and change the date range of your search (the default is last 24 hours).

There’s a lot of scope for serendipity here, but a few weaknesses.

The most obvious is lack of RSS or bookmarkability. Having to keep checking this site and, worse, repeat a search makes this extra work.

Secondly, the current sources are limited to Reuters, AP and Guardian.co.uk. News organisations should be helping make their content map-friendly to get in on this.

And related to this, locations are currently quite generic, seemingly based on text recognition. Imagine what this could do if it tapped into geotagged stories from local newspapers such as those of Archant?

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What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online?

Half the attendees represented the people behind the mainstream media’s attempts to get to grips with the web – the hyperlocal sites of the Teesside Gazette; the mapping and crowdsourcing of the Manchester Evening News; the blogs of the Birmingham Post.

The other half represented what is clear is an emerging cottage journalism industry: niche news websites; local blogs; citizen journalism and news prediction services.

Rick Waghorn’s keynote speech on his experiences of establishing and expanding MyFootBallWriter set things going perfectly. In particular his negative experiences of Google AdSense found a very receptive audience: despite 400,000 page impressions over the summer, he said, his AdSense revenues were only $180, while in seven years the most popular Harry Potter website has earned only $6,500 from the scheme. Following proceedings online, Graham Holliday added: “Bang on on Adsense – I do around 50,000 per month and make $100 – $150 off of it.”

The verdict from Rick: “Clearly if anybody is going to earn a living, it cannot be through Google Ads.”

Instead Rick explained his own business model – a combination of old-fashioned local ad sales; a self-built ad service, Addiply; affiliate sales; and syndication to those big publishers looking to add more local coverage to their global brands.

This was an ‘unconference’, so after Rick’s speech the emphasis was on discussion and exchanging experiences. The group discussing community spoke of the problem of users’ “sporadic involvement“; of journalists not connecting with people online; technological barriers to instant publishing; the need for journalists to become brands. There was an anecdote about bloggers recruited by the Birmingham Post ‘scooping’ the paper by scheduling embargoed news to go live the minute the embargo was lifted. (Not that the journalist concerned felt this was a bad thing).

The group discussing business models scratched their heads at the possibility of OhMyNews’ tip jar model working elsewhere and why it didn’t make a profit from ads and syndication; whether big publishers should buy up startups; and the problems of aggregation, Martin Stabe arguing that the only aggregators that had any chance of success were those that added something, such as geotagging.

The funding group talked of the importance of five year financial forecasts; how to tackle web-ignorant banks; why there was a need for a British equivalent of the Knight Foundation; and how angel investors want to see a big existing market because the risks of complete failure are lower.

And the online news models group discussed how journalism is not just about reporting, but networking; the importance of interaction on every level rather than simply forums; and the need to get out alerts, while ensuring accuracy.

The event was covered live by a team of journalism degree students using CoverItLive at JournalismEnterprise.com, which enabled people to contribute to the discussion – and create discussions of their own – online.

In addition there was a JEEcamp aggregator which pulled together blog posts, images, video, bookmarks and tweets following the event, and a Twitter aggregator pulling together tweets from attendees. Video of the event should appear on the European Journalism Centre website. Video of Rick’s speech was live streamed by Mark Comerford.

Reflections on the event worth reading elsewhere include Azeem Ahmad’s report on the day; Alex Gamela’s online highlights; Journalism.co.uk’s reports; Charlie Beckett on community; Pete Ashton on news as a game; and Rick Waghorn’s blog posts written after the event.

The day ended with a panel discussion of some of the emerging issues. As I looked out at the people gathered it occurred to me that in ten years time one half would probably have bought out the other half.

The question is, which half will be which?

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A few weeks ago I wrote an 800-word piece for UK Press Gazette on how journalism has changed in the past decade. My original draft was almost 1200 words – here then is the original ‘Blogger’s Cut’ for your delectation…

The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Paul Bradshaw counts the ways…

From a lecture to a conversation

Perhaps the biggest and most widely publicised change in journalism has been the increasing involvement of – and expectation of involvement by – the readers/audience. Yes, readers had always written letters, and occasionally phoned in tips, but the last ten years have seen the relationship between publisher and reader turn into something else entirely.

You could say it started with the accessibility of email, coupled with the less passive nature of the internet in general, as readers, listeners and watchers became “users”. But the change really gained momentum with…

The rise of the amateur

The blogs of September 11; the camcorder images from the Asian tsunami; the mobile phone images of July 7; the Facebook pages of Virginia Tech. If you needed to read about any of these major events, you could do so – if you wished – without opening a newspaper or watching TV.

The spread of cheap camcorders and video- and photo-enabled mobile phones, coupled with blogs and the viral distribution of the internet made publishers realise they were not only competing with each other, but with the readers themselves. And when a big story broke in public, they needed to be in a position to harvest what became known as “user generated content”. Thankfully the NUJ’s suggestion of “witness contributions” didn’t catch on…

Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now

If a newspaper didn’t reach a particular newsagent, or viewers in the Cumbria region were experiencing difficulties, that simply wasn’t a journalist’s problem. Online, however, distribution has become part of a journalist’s job description, whether they realise it or not.

From your Facebook profile to the way you respond to comments on your blog, a journalist’s activity online has formed a key element in any news organisation’s distribution (although few have yet realised this). Meanwhile, newspaper webpages have come out in a rash of ‘Digg/Blog this’ buttons, and Facebook applications from the likes of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have demonstrated how important it’s become for newspapers to be where the reader is, rather than the other way around.

Just a click away

Amidst all the Web 2.0 hype it’s easy to forget the fundamental characteristic of news in the online era: everything is connected; and the reader is only a click or a search away from something else. This has created major opportunities and challenges for journalists.

On the one hand, journalists can now link to full documents, previous reports, and unedited material. On the other, so can the readers. Material culled from wire copy is more easily spotted; and, as Dan Rather discovered, holes in your story can be quickly highlighted.

And while doorstepping used to be between you and the Dear Departed’s family, its digital equivalent is so much more public. The game has been raised – but have news organisations responded?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS is one of the most underestimated innovations in journalism. At it’s most basic level it means journalists can subscribe to a range of RSS feeds in one RSS reader – and therefore not have to keep checking back to dozens of original websites for updates. But the more people play with the technology, the more is being achieved.

For one thing, RSS enables very specific consumption: readers can now subscribe to just one section of a newspaper – or even one writer. In the Sun’s case, they can subscribe to search results. In terms of production, RSS enables different bits of news to be aggregated: pick a source, any source, and mash it up into a single feed. It works for Google News, why shouldn’t it work again?

Mapping

2007 saw some real experimentation with mapping in UK newspapers: the Manchester Evening News mapped fatal shootings in Manchester, the Grantham Journal

tracked a “killer heron” and the Lancashire Evening Post mapped roadworks and speed cameras. The Shropshire Star used it to map fuel prices.

But 2008 should mark the year mapping and geotagging gets serious. Leading the pack are Archant, with their much-awaited geotag-based website relaunches. Journalists, says Web Editor James Goffin, can now draw on a map when they submit a story, or supply postcodes. He argues it will “make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.” The Telegraph launched the first stage of their dynamic Flash-based political map of Britain, while the BBC are using similar technologies for their proposed local website plans, which looks likely to further increase the pressures on regional publishers.

Hyperlocal, international

The internet has released news organisations from the limitations of physical distribution and broadcast – to the extent that news organisations have seen a new market for their old print products.

The Guardian, emboldened by statistics about website visitors, took its step across the Atlantic in 2003; The Times followed in 2006, and the BBC announced plans to sell advertising on its international site last year. And figures released last month showed visitors from outside the UK outnumbering the domestic audience for the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Daily Mail.

Conversely, “hyperlocal” has entered the nomenclature of the news executive. Trinity Mirror’s Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news led to print equivalents, and likely extension to the group’s other newspapers.

Databases

The biggest untapped potential in journalism online is that of databases. So far we’ve seen some impressive demonstrations: ChicagoCrime.org famously drew information from a crime database onto a map of the area – and was followed by similar efforts at the LA Times and Washington Post (who added house sales and schools); The Herald Tribune, meanwhile, used databases in their coverage of how complaints against teachers were handled - readers could drill down to data in a specific school.

In the UK it’s The Telegraph leading the way, with football coverage that pulls up player statistics to rival ProZone, an A levels results map, and a recently unveiled political map that presents information on how local services ratings have improved or declined. Developments such as these have generated debate about whether journalists should be taught how to program. The conclusion seemed to be that it was easier to teach programmers how to do journalism.

Measurability

Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Multimedia

If the pen is mightier than the sword, what does that make a microphone, camcorder and laptop… in a wifi hotspot? Newspapers dabbled in podcasts in 2005, before really mucking in 2006 when video took off and print journalists started worrying for the first time about tea staining their teeth. Now print journalists are learning about white balance, and broadcast journalists are learning about local news. And everyone is waiting for an almighty fight.

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The team at JournalismEnterprise.com have been busy – here are some of the most recent reviews:

Pownce: a Twitter with bells on.

EveryBlock: Adrian Holovaty’s much-anticipated news mapping service gets a five-star rating.

Newstin: multilingual news search: “Its taxonomy engine goes way beyond the usual keyword and tags approach. For each article, Newstin’s engine is able to tell you what it’s about, who was mentioned, where it happened, etc.”

Gnooze:  satirical daily news show for YouTube browsers.

Skewz: “a political Digg that goes both ways. You can submit any news story and the community can vote on how “liberal” or “conservative” the story is.”

As always, the review is only the start of the process: please add your own comments on the sites. And if you want to review sites for JournalismEnterprise.com, what’s stopping you? Send an email to info@journalismenterprise.com to join.

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