‘Gerbalism’? Where have we heard that before?

Delicious has a rather neat feature that allows you to see what are the most popular recent bookmarks for a particular keyword.

While  browsing a RSS feed of recent popular bookmarks with the tag ‘journalism’, we were somewhat amused to come across a blog post at the Toronto star with the title ‘Is it journalism or ‘gerbalism‘?

This rang a bell with some of the longer-serving members of Journalism.co.uk. A quick search of our archives revealed a story published on 1 April 2004 about the launch of a rodent-focused new ‘ezine’ called gerbalism.co.uk.

Now every rodent lover knows that gerbil ends in ‘il’ and not ‘al’ so it is doubly strange that this mis-spelled and entirely fictitious term should surface again five years later in a journalism-related blog post headline.

Which just goes to prove that there’s no fool like an old (April’s) fool and that it’s not just gerbils that have long tails…

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TheStar.com: Alternative funding avenues for investigative journalism

The Toronto Star’s John Honderich looks at five options for funding investigative stories in Canada. These are already relatively well-known examples among journalist/media commentators and bloggers, but Honderich’s post is an interesting read.

• Government funded or subsidised journalism
• Independent non-profit newsrooms, a la ProPublica.
• Using private foundations, such as Philip Stern’s the Fund for Investigative Journalism
• Participatory investigative journalism, e.g Spot.us
• Journalism students working in tandem with investigative reporters

Full story at this link…

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Toronto Star: Google News respects copyright, says content specialist

Google News respects copyright and is not looking to move into content creation, Josh Cohen, content specialist for the search giant’s news channel, has said in a Q&A with the Toronto Star.

“…[I]t’s really about helping people to find the content that’s out there. We just don’t see ourselves as content creators. We’re more of a platform for that content,” he said.

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Toronto star axes entire web production team

Canadian publishing group Torstar corp is to cut 160 jobs across its newspaper publishing division, CBC News reports.

Flagship title the Toronto Star will lose 120 staff including the paper’s entire internet production team.

The publisher hopes the cuts will save $12 million (in Canadian dollars – around £6 million) annually.

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