Almost hidden away in an issue which is first and foremost on "Journalism and Black America", this issue of the Nieman Reports also contains a section on "Blogging and Journalism". More reading... Got to start writing, got to start writing.
I've been busy organising this inaugural event to be held from 12 - 16 July
The purpose of the week is to focus on some key issues and attract attention to the emerging role of PR bloggers in developing and spreading knowledge about public relations. Often decried as a secretive profession we want to share our knowledge with everyone and encourage a better understanding of the contribution we make to our societies
The latest dispatch from the filesharing frontlines - interesting reading. As predicted, movie filesharing is now joining music, and legal actions or legal services have little impact so far. Interesting to see the IFPI CEO say that "of course, over the longer term we expect a steady fall in illegal file-sharing; something we've already seen happen since the RIAA announced lawsuits early 2003" - wonder what makes him believe in that 'steady fall', since so far there's no indication of it whatsoever.
Finally worked my way through the very useful report We Media by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis at the Media Center at the American Press Institute. A good overview of what they term participatory journalism, with many connections to my own research. From this report, several further references also need investigation:
Yay - the International Internet Preservation Consortium, which I'm a member of, now has a public Website (which will, in good time, hopefully be preserved by the IIPC). The Consortium is a group of about a dozen national libraries around the world, aiming to develop tools for archiving noteworthy Internet content in their collections. I'm on the researchers' group which will advise on what we consider archive-worthy content, and how we would want to access it once it's archived.
As if the music industry didn't have enough to worry about: Slashdot reports that users are now Shifting from P2P to Stream Ripping - that is, using their computers to 'tape' online radio stations 24 hours a day. Quality is good (and getting better); song IDs enable sorting and selection of incoming songs - as broadband spreads and bandwidth increases, this virtually untraceable brute-force approach to downloading music might really become a viable alternative...
A new Wired about the rise of blogging approaches to news reporting: The News, One Entry at a Time. Might be time to pull together all of these individual reports into a greater whole...