YouTube is introducing YouTube Trends, which, in a video on the site describes itself as a "scientifically enhanced way to understand YouTube." The new technology will "detect viral media vibrations" to understand what videos are 'trending' - in other words, what everyone is watching.

"With 35 hours of video now being uploaded to YouTube every minute, keeping up with the latest goings-on around here can be a challenge," the YouTube blog reads. YouTube Trends aims to highlight the 'best' videos, based on who's watching them. It provides the top 10 trending videos and the top 10 trending topics.

The Trends Dashboard allows you to search for the most viewed and most shared videos by country, or city in the US, by age, and by gender. You can directly compare up to three different searches and the Dashboard can highlight which videos lists have in common, for example.

An accompanying blog goes into more detail about the videos and trends and their cultural significance. Currently, it is providing the top 10s of 2010 in different categories.

In the New York Times, Brian Stelter tried to take the stock of the US news coverage of the Afghan. "As the Obama administration conducted an Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review this month, the news media did too, and the coverage came peppered with question marks", he said.

He cited the ABC News series of segments titled "Afghanistan: Can We Win?", the special report "Can This War Be Won?" of CBS Evening News by Katie Couric and a recent New York magazine headline questioning "Why Are We in Afghanistan?"

"The questions reflect the complex nature of the Afghan war, and of the news coverage", he argued.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, of the Pew Research Center, cited in the Stelter's article, produces every week a News Coverage Index, analyzing which news dominate the week.

>Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, said that British broadcasters should be able to launch an opinionated channel like Fox News in the UK, the Guardian reported. As the distinction between the web and television collapse, he argued while speaking a seminar on impartiality in broadcasting, the existing rules to guarantee impartiality are becoming outdated. In his opinion it no longer makes sense then for public service broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to have a monopoly over the airwaves.

A New York-based research firm has been offering cash to reporters who are willing to give their opinions on their area of expertise, the Washington Post reported. PFC Opinion Research is looking for journalists who cover the energy sector and is proposing to pay them $250 to answer questions for about 25 minutes, specified the Post.

An email sent last week to journalists, including several at the Washington Post, requested reporters who were willing to talk about "certain aspects of oil and gas industries." It promised to pay them in cash and keep their names private.

This kind of procedure clearly raises ethical issues. The client PFC is working for is presumably someone with an interest in the sector. Reporters strive to keep their own opinions out of their writing, so how can they justify selling their opinions to those who they are likely to report on?

The Washington Post spoke to David Leonard, director of PFC, who compared journalists' participation to being part of a focus group. "We're trying to learn how people feel about policy," he told the Post, rather than trying to shape an ad campaign.

The biggest ethical issue seems to be that the reporters would be paid for their time. Taking money from such an initiative could well be interpreted as a conflict of interest.

Amazon presented today the update for its Kindle for Android app, allowing readers to access more than 100 and magazines, Editor & Publisher revealed.

"Amazon has long offered access to newspaper and magazine content via its Kindle hardware devices, but this is the first time that functionality has been extended to third-party gadgets," explained Mashable.

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

The Register Citizen Newsroom Café opened earlier this week: an initiative of the Journal Register Co's Torrington, Connecticut-based paper that aims to allow the public into the newsroom and to invite the community "to be part of the process of local journalism at every step."

The paper's new office is based around this "open newsroom" concept and also has a Community Media Lab, a Community Journalism School and a Local News Library, all of which are free and open to the general public, the project's blog said. The first day saw more than 100 members of the community turn up.

The café offers free public wifi, "comfortable coffee house-style seating," and coffee and snacks for sale.

The community is encouraged to sit in on and participate in the newsroom's daily story meetings, which will also be live-streamed at RegisterCitizen.com. Several members of the public joined the first meeting, and more than 120 people watched the live video of the meeting, contributing via a live online chat.

"Story tips and questions from the live chat and in-person public input added stories to our coverage list yesterday and influenced the direction of other stories," wrote publisher Matt De Rienzo the day after the first meeting.

The US government and others will use the latest WikiLeaks release "as reason for secrecy for many years to come," believes Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the Associated Press. It may take some time for the situation to change, but governments will try to plug what leaks they can and "lock things down," she said. She was speaking at the Nieman Lab event "From Watergate to Wikileaks: Secrecy and Journalism in the New Media Age."

All governments want to keep secrets from the public, she said, sometimes for the right reasons, but sometimes not. "Governments too often stretch the national security rationale well beyond reason," she continued, and there is a lot of information that is 'classified' that has little reason to be so. She pointed out that the US government spends $9 billion a year on keeping information secret. The US is far from being alone in this practice, Carroll said: and threats against journalists for reporting on what the government wants to keep secret is "an all too familiar sad story in too many countries."

Grace Mugabe is suing Zimbabwean newspaper the Standard for US$15 million for reporting on information released by Wikileaks that said she made "tremendous" profits from the sale of illigally mined diamonds, the Guardian reported today.

The defamation suit was brought by the first lady of the country in high court yesterday over an article published Sunday by the Standard, which quoted from the U.S. embassy cable released by Wikileaks. The 2008 cable, sent by former U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee, stated that "High-ranking Zimbabwean government officials and well-connected elites are generating millions of dollars in personal income by hiring teams of diggers to hand-extract diamonds," according to SWRadioAfrica.com. The stones are generally referred to as "blood diamonds," because of the human rights abuses associated with their extraction, and the cable specifically named Mrs. Mugabe and the country's central bank governor, Gideon Gono, Aljazeera explained.

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

Bloomberg has announced that it would begin publishing editorials in an effort to broaden the company's influence on national affairs, the New York Times reported.

Bloomberg View, as the initiative is called, will publish columns and commentary across all Bloomberg platforms and will be run by two executive editors: David Shipley, deputy editorial page editor and op-ed editor of the New York Times, and James P. Rubin, former assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton.

As Talking Biz News says, Rubin will oversee editorial issues in Central and South America, Mexico, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and Shipley will maintain oversight of the U.S. and Canada. Both will report directly to the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, Matthew Winkler.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, was yesterday named Time magazine's 2010 person of the year.

Every year Time magazine gives its accolade "to the person or thing judged to have most influenced the culture and the news during the past year, for good or for ill," the Guardian reported.

The Guardian quoted Time journalist Lev Grossman, who said that Zuckerberg was honoured "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives".

"Twitter has analyzed the 25 billion tweets sent in 2010 and published the list of top overall trends in the year behind us," Mashable reported, "as well as the top 10 trending topics in eight categories: news events, people, movies, television, technology, World Cup, sports and hashtags."

The 10 overall top trends are: Gulf Oil Spill, FIFA World Cup, Inception, Haiti Earthquake, Vuvuzela, Apple iPad, Google Android, Justin Bieber, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Pulpo Paul. Vuvuzela, the plastic horn used during the football match in South Africa, and Paul the Octopus, used to predict the winner of matches, refer both to the FIFA World Cup.

The Gulf Oil Spill and the Haiti Earthquake are at the top of the news events list, followed by Pakistan Floods, Koreas Conflict, Chilean Miners Rescue, Chavez Tas Ponchao, Wikileaks Cablegate, Hurrican Earl, Prince William's Engagement and World Aids Day.