OhmyNews: Interview with Margaret Caldwell, the world’s oldest columnist?

Eric Shackle puts the questions to Margaret Caldwell, 102, weekly columnist for the Desert Valley Times in Nevada.

Full story at this link…

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Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – Grouping Twitter contacts

Twitter: Using Flock O’Tweets you can group together your Twitter contacts and subscribe to an RSS feed of their updates – great for following certain topics or themes. Tipster: Laura Oliver.

To submit a tip to Journalism.co.uk, use this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

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Newsless: On providing news and context

“We don’t just cover the news for the sake of telling people what happened; we cover the news to help our communities understand themselves better, so they can improve (…) the trail of a story doesn’t end with the passage of a bill or the resignation of an official. It doesn’t end at all. It merely connects with more and more dots that form an ever-clearer picture of a better society,” writes Newsless.

via News as a hook for context at Newsless.org.

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Cyberjournalist.net: How Hearst Magazine increased traffic 150% with SEO

CJ talks to senior SEO analyst for Hearst, Dan Roberts, about how he helped grow online traffic to the publisher’s website by 150 per cent using SEO and Wordtracker.

Full story at this link…

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Malcolm Coles: Times Online finds success with StumbleUpon

Some quick analysis over at Malcolm Coles’ blog, suggests that Times Online is the most popular UK national newspaper when it comes to article-sharing/bookmarking on StumbleUpon.

Full post at this link…

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Jason DaPonte: BeebCamp and new ways of working at the BBC

Summing up the BBC’s ‘unconference’ event for its digital staff, BeebCamp, Jason DaPonte imagines a new way for the BBC to work:

“Each year you pay your license fee to the BBC in exchange for programming that you own and control the destiny of. YOU decide what gets made because YOU decide which ideas, programmes, themes, seasons, etc you want to invest in. This could be done via an online marketplace…” writes DaPonte.

Full post at this link…

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Craig McGill: ‘The Redundant Journalist Guide to PR’

Journalist-turned-PR man Craig McGill offers his downloadable guide to switching professions.

Full post and download of the guide at this link…

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Meyer’s letter to the Media Standards Trust in full

As reported on the main Journalism.co.uk site, here is the letter sent by the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Sir Christopher Meyer, to the Media Standards Trust in response to its request for participation in stage two of its ‘A More Accountable Press’ report:

More »

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Berkeley Daily Planet launches ‘Fund for Local Reporting’

In a frank article about the paper’s future, the owners of US independent newspaper the Berkeley Daily Planet admit they don’t have a solution for plugging the revenue gap in their ailing ad-supported business model.

Enter the Fund for Local Reporting, which is asking for donations large and small to keep the Planet running.

“As we explained in a recent editorial, paying salaries and benefits just for the reporters and editors who cover local news adds up to at least $250,000 a year. That doesn’t include production, rent, printing, distribution, sales etc,” reads the online payment form.

The O’Malleys, the paper’s owners, are also exploring developing the fund into a tax-exempt, not-for-profit organisation. Indeed, they’ve been toying with lots of ideas – part of a ‘reality check’, the editor says – including voluntary subscriptions and migrating to the web [All ideas mooted in today's #cfund debate]. They might not know what the solution is, and this might be a last roll of the dice, but they’re certainly going for it with all they’ve got.

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Frontline Club soft-launches new site

It’s not finished yet, but FrontlineClub.com’s new look has soft-launched. We’ll be following up with more details next week but for the time being you can check out its new look news page, with ‘Blogs’ split from ‘News‘. And for any foodie journalists (or journalistic foodies) you might be interested in the new blog on the Frontline Restaurant page. So watch this space and we’ll update when it’s fully functional in the next week or so.

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