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A piece published on The New York Times posed a provocative question: could wiki technology help find Osama Bin Laden?

The answer is maybe. If any Pakistani or Afghan were armed with a mobile phone to send text messages to authorities with anonymous tips on where to look. If the information they sent could then be processed and scattered on a map, over time, a pattern of plots would hopefully show a number of reports in one area and lead to organized action and eventual capture of the terrorist leader.

This kind of Internet mapping tool based on anonymous tips and journalistic reports already exists. It is called, Ushahidi or testimony in Swahili, and its powerful software could help journalists cover news.

The AP was one of many companies to announce the creation of an app for the new Windows 7 phone at MIX10 this week, Microsoft's annual conference of designers and developers.

The Windows 7 app comes as part of the AP Gateway initiative, the business unit created with the aim of using new technologies to " offer a variety of ways for AP member publishers and broadcasters to take their content to market," according to an AP press release.  AP Gateway confirmed that the AP would also be offering a paid iPad app ready for download upon the device's release in June.

Covering all technological bases, the AP also announced the creation of a Microsoft reader for PCs and a tool its calling "Microsoft Pivot," which was described as a "visual search tool that can be applied to support e-commerce and business intelligence."

Although checking sources is a fundamental rule of journalism, with the increasing pervasiveness of social media sites like Twitter, the temptation to discard this old rule can become too strong for some journalists to resist.

As the Press Gazette's Dominick Ponsford posted on The Wire, reporters for various newpapers in the UK used Twitter as a source for an article covering rumors of marital difficulties between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni. The Independent's Steven Glover reprimanded the reporters for their failure to fact-check.

"A Twitter rumour alleging adultery on the part of a home-grown politician would not be taken up so eagerly by British newspapers," he said. "We apply more stringent standards to rumours about our own politicians."

The 8.8 earthquake that ravaged central Chile on February 27 has also wreaked havoc on the newspapers that operate in the region. While some continued to print with borrowed electric generators and improvised newsrooms, some were forced to halt publishing for a number of days. Most of the local newspapers websites' in the most affected areas were down in the aftermath of the quake. But, even though the worst seems to be over for this battered nation's newspapers, damage to the country's largest paper factories could become a big problem for not only Chilean but also other south American newspapers.

As aftershocks still rattled central Chile, the Editors Weblog spoke to the General Manager of the Asociación Nacional de la Prensa of Chile, Ignacio Muñoz, about how the earthquake has affected Chilean newspapers and how they have coped with the difficulties of reporting under extraordinary circumstances.

The surge in social media has benefited journalists globally by offering them a world of information at their fingertips with powerful social networking tools and news aggregator sites. But this opportunity comes along with some risks as well. To lessen these risks, Reuters has added social media guidelines and principles to its handbook, Dean Wright, global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards at Reuters, announced yesterday in the Reuters Blog.

While Reuters embraces social media as a powerful informative tool and encourages its usage among journalists, they must ask permission from managers to use social media in conjunction with their professional lives, MediaGuardian reported.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

The headquarters of Agora, Poland's biggest media concern, in a southern district of Warsaw, have huge windows as a façade, and inside, terraces on every floor. The whole configuration seems to facilitate contact between the different editorial units housed in this imposing building. They are numerous and varied, from flagship daily Gazeta Wyborcza to freesheet Metro, from talk-news radio Tok FM to countless Internet portals and the administrative departments. Their members or contributors don't need to go to the basement, to the cafeteria, to see people from other platforms or professional cultures. The in-house newsstand and bookstore, which sell not only the group's productions, also remind them they are not alone in the industry.

Agora, which also has a strong presence in magazine, book and DVD publishing, in music-film production and in outdoor advertising, has more than half of its 3,150-odd employees based in this "horizontal skyscraper". The architecture building that is longer than it is tall, with stretching, low wall corridors, may reflect the interaction between separate units. Ironically however, it also contradicts the term "vertical", often heard in this four-storey building and applied to some of the integrated online activities.

"We are in all media platforms except television," says Grzegorz Piechota, the special projects editor for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading quality newspaper.  "For a decade, we have been particularly active in extending our expertise in Internet, finding synergies between online and print operations. Agora is in everything except porn, instant messaging and mapping!"

The group, whose operations are essentially Polish, counts more than 80 portals (more than Germany's Axel Springer for example, another media titan but at a world level). Agora's main portal gazeta.pl, fed by an independent newsroom integrated with radio Tok FM, is complemented by webradio tuba.fm and many other stand-alone verticals. These cover all sorts of issues, including sport, business, education, recruitment and real-estate. Most of them are leaders in their niche, and their combined audience is sixth right after Google, Polish equivalents of Facebook (nasza-klasa.pl) and E-bay (allegro.pl), and the two leaders onet.pl and Wirtualna Polska. Nearly two thirds of Poland's 17 million Internet users regularly visit gazeta.pl and its affiliated portals. Wyborcza.pl, the flagship daily's e-edition, attracts three million users and brought in  24% of the daily's advertising revenues in 2009.

Agora has been particularly proactive in looking for synergies and complementary activities made possible by the Internet. The group has implemented a multi-brand strategy which is adjusted according to the fields covered. Gazeta Wyborcza, for instance, is fully integrated only in areas that make it more appropriate, with the verticals sport.pl (launched in 2006) or wyborcza.biz (created last year).

This business portal was editorially independent from the daily when it started, in order to be more flexible than print journalists, who were considered "too serious and slow". It was filled with gossips on economic players, which was a mistake, Agora's executives admitted. "It was not the right way to attract a loyal audience. The people we target, let's say graduate readers in their 30s, with minimum 1,000 euros monthly income, have no time and are in search of serious news," explains Leszek Olszanski, the head of wyborcza.pl. "Advertisers also want to reach them through non-trivial material, which is why we work with seasoned print editors. We realized there are complementary abilities between online rapidity on one hand, and thoughtful coverage of an industry on the other."

Thanks to this integration, top economic columnists of Gazeta Wyborcza now write more. They allegedly enjoy having more space for their texts, and having the possibility to work on breaking news in real-time. The portal benefits from the credibility conferred by the paper, which in turn has become more analytical rather than news-driven. "We try to wait for the print edition for exclusivities, if possible. These scoops can be accompanied in the website's pages by teasers before, and follow-ups after," Olszanski notes.

Wyborcza.biz  has become a strong brand, along with its associated portal money.pl. Financial institutions, in particular, compete to be advertised in their pages. This year, the online revenues of the economic section should represent 50% of print earnings. Like the in-house newsstand, the sales forces also market ads for other business sites. It is in Agora's philosophy to tap into all potential income sources - not only news driven - and on the cooperative character of the Internet. "On the Net, you do business with your competitors. There is a business reason to build networks to cover them, and our expertise also includes sales to advertisers," Piechota explained.

Agora does not only play with complementarities rooted on its traditional print activities. The 50-person team managed by Pawel Stremski, as gazeta.pl/Tok FM's chief editor, is half web and half radio. Last January his unit added another website to Agora's e-basket, with the launch of tok-fm.pl, which is not a webradio (a station by the same name, broadcast in Poland's nine main cities, was already accessible on the webradio portal tuba.fm). Agora did not create another website for the sake of it, but saw Tok FM's recognized brand as an opportunity for Internet too. "The same team fills gazeta.pl for a mass market audience, and tok-fm.pl for politics and business with some entertainment content. People can follow a major hearing by a politician live, in a video coverage on tok-fm.pl, and get a summary in the other portals," Stremski says.

The website's beta version was successful in having radio journalists send in their notes, according to its promoters. Conscious of brand impact, these reporters see it as a more dynamic, immediate way to publish their stories. Gazeta Wyborcza's central newsroom is not a tok-fm.pl contributor, but its local editors are. They are based in 20 bureaus out of Warsaw, and can publish their non-print productions in the new portal. They receive no extra pay for these contributions, but they have an incentive: there is an award each month for the best exclusive story.

"We have to be fast, entertaining and multimedia, finding the way to be different," Stremski says. "There is room for good profitable journalism in Internet. By going multimedia, you get more informers, your story is not stuck on page 6, even though the credibility conferred by print remains essential."

Another advantage of creating tok-fm.pl is that in Poland's competitive media environment, newspapers not belonging to Agora are less reluctant to refer to Tok FM as a source, rather than Gazeta Wyborcza. Having many brands gives more possibilities to be quoted for scoops, and to be profitable too. "We cannot expect to make money with every website. A lifestyle or a local news website is more likely to be cost-effective from the start than a general news portal," Stremski notes.

Agora's online operations have gone even more vertical in the past months, with the majority takeover of AdTaily. This start-up company based in Krakow provides a widget-based system for advertising monetization of Internet services (including those offered by the group's platforms which at the moment house about 130,000 bloggers). "AdTaily developed a universal tool that can be used for cooperation with external customers," commented Tomasz Jozefacki, Agora's director of Internet operations. "Currently its system is used by 80% of our online media."

In other words, the group is taking advantage of the blogosphere's innovations and income potentials, including e-commerce for web entrepreneurs who want to monetize their social media. "Agora realized that to be online, you need to acquire the bright guys who are in the business, and can help you to be more efficient in new platforms. Our expertise is not just about gathering news; we have to think wide," Piechota says.

AdTaily is based on the assumption that anybody can be an advertiser. It has developed a self-service ad tool designed for niche blogs, giving advertisers the opportunity to reach narrowly-targeted audiences. Its promoters insist that their system allows 70% of the ad revenues to go directly to the bloggers, with an easy to understand flat fee, unlike Google's  AdSense. "It is a great instrument for hyperlocal news websites, covering towns or districts with around 10,000 residents, where they can advertise the local shoe shops," says Jakub Krzych, one of the start-up's co-founders. "It would not make sense for Agora to buy a website on white boots or on a Krakow district. But through AdTaily, it can indirectly get some revenue streams from very specialized news websites."

Will Agora be successful with its online activism and verticalism? The group is at least trying to be as active as possible in new media platforms, and in a way that is not too costly. The investment in AdTaily also reveals that it does not believe in the online pay walls envisaged by Rupert Murdoch or the New York Times, as most contents are being commoditized. Its multi-brand strategy invites the editorial units to fill the empty spots that appear on the Net. "The publishing business used to be easy!" Piechota joked.

As companies slash newsroom budgets, they are also scaling back on one of their civic duties: legal battles to gain access to government information, reports The New York Times.

But while many regional newspapers are choosing to cut expenses on lawyers, asking them to work pro bono, another trend paints the opposite story, say press advocates and First Amendment lawyers.

Some companies including Hearst and The Associated Press have been quietly stepping up their legal efforts, by doing more of the work in-house, utilizing their in-house lawyers and being more aggressive in states where they can recoup legal fees and the federal level, which also allows plaintiffs in such access cases to sue for legal fees when they win.

In a move to step up its social feature repertoire, Google Inc., released its new social media product, Buzz, this week. This new networking tool that mixes some of the programs Google has created over the years and could prove very useful for journalists, according to Poynter Online.

However, these enhanced capabilities could come at a price for news outlets.

After the first efforts to get reporters on the ground in Haiti and to get vital communications infrastructure up and running, a fuller picture of the importance of social media in the disaster has emerged. Journalist Cristina Romero, writing for the European Journalism Centre, has explained the role of social networking in the earthquake's aftermath.

Social media provide both a way for those on the ground to connect with emergency relief workers, and a way for reporters and bloggers to access authentic information about the impact of the disaster, Romero writes.

Some of the first footage of the wake of the earthquake came from civilians shooting video on their mobile phones. SMS was the primary method of reporting at first, while the landlines and other traditional channels were down.

Google has just launched a new tool that allows visitors tell its news website what topics they would like to follow, AFP information on Yahoo! News reports.

This will allow users to click on "stars" to mark groups of stories on preferred subjects to signal Google News to watch for updates or developments, according to Google software engineer Jude Britto. When there are significant updates, Google will send alerts by putting the headline in bold for its users. Google will also allow people to follow their 20 most recent starred stories in the "Starred" section of Google News, according to the Google News blog.

Twitter has introduced a 'Local Trends' filter, which allows users to see what others are posting about on the site in their area.

The official Twitter blog explained that the trends function began as a way to see what was popular on a global scale in real-time, but this would create another way for members to discover relevant topics to them.

"The big events that come up around the world will always become a global conversation," a spokesperson writes, "but what about the big events that only happen in your world that only matter to those around you? Or the slight differences in the way Californians perceive an event, like Obama's election victory, versus those (in) São Paulo, Brazil?"

The Australian media regulatory body is set to start using social media, having appointed a former newspaper editor to create its social media strategy.

Tom Burton, former executive editor of broadsheet newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, has been appointed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to oversee its government 2.0 and social engagement strategies.

Burton was previously working in the US as the Communications and On-Line Director of The Center for American Progress. His role involved implementing web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 practices, that is, changing how the government used social networking sites, blogs, video sharing sites and wikis to interact with the public. He has also worked as a ministerial adviser to a former Australian Minister for Communications.

Journalists should be willing to fight for strong freedom of information and open records laws, said the president of the Associated Press in a speech on Friday.

Speaking at the Kentucky Press Association, AP president Tom Curley stressed the importance of these laws as part of the "journalistic tool kit" to help reporters access information in the public interest.

"It's vital," he said. "A strong FOIA in the hands of strong journalists with strong legal support breaks news."

Most of Google's news tools are fairly self-explanatory. Fast Flip enables users to flick through different news sources. Living Stories collects all the developments about a single story on a single URL. And of course Google News aggregates news, and has been a source of ongoing conflict between Google and news publishers. But Google Wave notoriously confuses its first time users. There's even a gently mocking website dedicated to things that are easier to understand than Google Wave.

First launched as an invitation-only preview, Google Wave is billed as both a conversation and a document. It's a little like email, but also real-time and collaborative. One potential use of the tool is as a platform for collaborative journalism: different participants could add notes, information and images to a story.

It can also be used for community building, and the blog Journalism 2.0 has offered one possible example of what this might look like. A guest post by Hilary Fosdal, the interactive content manager for Barrington Broadcasting in Illinois, explains the way that the Chicago Tribune's RedEye website uses Google Wave.

Two thousand and nine was undoubtedly the year of the Social Network. In a world of loose economic foundations and falling advertising revenue, the social aspect of the Internet became even more important in the lives of many people.

News on your mobile phone is becoming ever more popular in the west, with The Guardian and The Daily Mirror the latest newspapers to release iPhone apps. But as The Guardian's Digital Content blog reminds us, mobile phones have been an important tool in news distribution in Africa for some time.

Rather than using bandwidth-hungry applications, though, text messages are used to disseminate news headlines, in a broadcast model that mirrors the widespread use of radio as a news medium on the continent. Newspapers are a less important news source outside urban areas, and access to the internet is not yet widespread.

Today the Daily Express has put its print archive online, featuring pages from every edition stretching back to 1900 when the newspaper was first established, the Guardian reported.

Composed of over 1.7 million pages and the result of two years work, the paper states that the archive "will be of interest to everyone, from schools to historians to the reader who wants to look up a particular event to see how it was viewed at the time. It is a unique treasure trove of stories and facts."

Google announced Monday that it will now be streaming updates from social networking sites in real time as search results. When a term is typed into a Google search, the lead result will now be a section of constantly updating social network, news site, and blog postings pertinent to the topic. 

Is investigative journalism giving up on newspapers? "No!," stressed Aroon Purie, the founding chairman and editor-in-chief of the India Today Group.

Purie, a well known journalist in India, spoke earlier this afternoon on a panel discussing the abandonment of investigative journalism in newspapers.

"You need smart Journalists, determined journalists, people who have a passion for this," Purie explained.

The BBC has announced today that it will not charge for online news, despite accusations from James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, that it is "throttling" the market and preventing competitors from expanding online.

Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust chairman, said the corporation has "no intention of diluting BBC commitment to universal access to free news online," words likely to anger the News Corp CEO, who is at the forefront of plans to begin charging online.  

YouTube is releasing a new open-source interface called YouTube Direct that aims to make it easier for news organisations to have access to relevant clips from citizen journalists, it was widely reported. The application, to be unveiled today, will allow media outlets to integrate a video upload tool into their sites, where they can accept and screen user footage, described TechCrunch. All content uploaded will also appear on the YouTube site.

As more and more of the public are equipped to record video on cameras or mobile phones, and it becomes easier to upload, citizen contributions are being welcomed at more and more news outlets, particularly as financial difficulties are cau. So many videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute, however, that it is hard to find news-worthy content and very difficult to ascertain its reliability.

Twitter Lists, a highly anticipated new feature of the social networking site, is set to be updated from its current beta version and released into the public arena sometime this week, Poynter Online has reported.

The feature will permit users to create and follow themed lists of breaking news feeds, news outlets, specific journalists, niche sources, or indeed any group of related Twitter users. It is expected that the tool will be particularly handy for the news hungry or journalists.

See part 1 for discussion of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's initiative PG+

The Times of London has started a different kind of club, which does not provide any extra editorial content, but gives its members the chance to take advantage of a range of offers. These include free gifts, opportunities to save money and members-only competitions. The initiative is an expansion of the membership only Culture+, a venture launched last September, limited to print subscribers, which attracted over 90.000 active members. The Times decided that more could be done with this, and Suzi Watford, who had headed Culture+, was put in charge of the more general-interest programme Times+.

Watford told the EW that there are no specific plans to introduce extra editorial content in the future, but it was not an option that had been ruled out. It is no secret that the Times' parent company News Corp, headed by Rupert Murdoch, has plans to put pay walls around at least some online content at all its papers in the near future, but Watford gave no indication that there is a possibility that this might be linked to Times+. 

Unlike PG+, the Times offering is clearly an attempt to enhance the value of the print product, as membership is complimentary to print subscribers. "It's still first and foremost linked into subscription," Watford said.

There is a general section of Times+, and then there are two different more focused packs - Travel+ and Culture+, which offer extra awards. Each membership to Times+ includes one of these packs and the other can be bought: £25 for print subscribers and £50 for non-subscribers. The Travel+ pack includes the Sunday Times travel magazine once a month, and travel-focused offers of a higher value, such as room upgrades. The Culture+ pack offers members a regular choice of free gift, often a book, CD or DVD, and offers such as a free glass of champagne at the Royal Albert Hall.

Currently, Times+ seems likely to appeal more to Londoners than those living in other parts of the country, as so many of the offers are London-based. "That is definitely not intentional," said Watford, however, "and it's something we want to change."

Some of the offers are events that give members an opportunity for contact with the editorial staff. For example, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Times+ members were invited to the Times Café where they could have free tea or coffee and meet journalists. Times cartoonist Peter Brookes gave a talk at a small gallery in London for another event.

When choosing which offers to provide, "we work very closely with editorial," said Watford, "particularly on the arts events that are coming up. We run past the editorial team that partners that we are going to be working with and pay close attention to the ones that they think are going to be useful."

Currently, the site itself offers little potential for interaction, simply a 'wall' where members can post comments in the 'newsroom' area of the site. Here, members do have the chance to leave their feedback about what they like and dislike about the site. And Watford feels that the members do have a chance to network in person: "whilst the site doesn't have a community aspect, we find that at the events that we do - the readers enjoy meeting each other, as well as the writers."

Will in bring in significant revenue?

For a start, Times+ will provide some income from anybody who chooses to sign up. It seems very possible, however, that the package will be viewed just as much as an extra benefit of subscription as as a stand-alone item of value. "We are obviously keen to push subscriptions and Times+ is both a fantastic retention tool and reward for those people but also a great acquisition tool," said Watford. "If people are passionate about travel or culture then they should subscribe to the newspaper." Another probably not insignificant revenue stream, one which PG+ is also likely to benefit from, is commission when readers take up the offers that are promoted.

As well as bringing in new revenue, Times+ offers the paper a less tangible but no less valuable benefit, the chance to enhance its core, loyal community of readers. "We know that our readers and customers are passionate about the editorial content in the paper. And this just provides more ways for them to enjoy that content and more ways for them to engage with it," said Watford.

This is a significant aspect of membership clubs, the idea of being more connected to the paper. It is a motivation which only a newspaper with a strong identity can take advantage of. Both Times+ and PG+ offer their members this less concrete but important benefit: the Times, a national, quality newspaper seems to be trying to give its readers the chance to be part of something a little exclusive, sophisticated, while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a city paper with clout, is allowing readers to have a more personal newspaper experience.

Many feel that charging for online content outright will not work, and there is a strong likelihood that unless a paper is offering something which nobody else is giving away, its online audience may well decide it is not worth paying. Recent polls show reluctance amongst UK and US readers to pay online. A membership scheme that also offers readers something else, something that makes them feel they are getting their money's worth, while tying them closer to the paper, might well work better.