Changing media landscape seen in coverage of G20 summit

When the G20 summit was held in London in early 2009, coverage was not limited to the usual journalists. EditorsWeblog reports:

As twenty of the world’s leading political figures convened at London’s Excel centre something unprecedented was happening in the media world – with coverage going digital in a way never before seen.

What’s more was that the key players providing the coverage were not just your usual brigade of journalists but also consisted of the general public who, by using social networking tools such as Twitter, provided an additional news element to this year’s summit.

Bloggers, NGO representatives, charity workers, casual onlookers to climate change campaigners caught up in the day’s events – a variety of people contributed to the coverage, helping to build a more complete picture of what was happening on the streets of London.

The article offers lots more information about this shift and the rapid embrace of new media tools by traditional journalists.

Good tutorial for adding audio clips to stories

Here’s a great little tutorial to help students embed audio clips in their online stories: “How to Embed MP3 Audio Files In Web Pages With Google or Yahoo! Flash Player”

Hyperlocal news sites on the rise

In “‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers,” Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone of The New York Times ask, “If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage?” The answer: “Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.”

The authors note that “Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing.”

Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, backer of 35 local Web experiments, points out that the news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be. Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.”