US TV network NBC is planning to integrate tweets from the top 20 Twitter accounts within its 10 markets, according to a report by lostremote.com.

‘The 20′ will be asked to discuss trending topics in their area and the discussions will be featured in on-air segments, the report adds.

There’s no word on how NBC will pick the top 20, other than follower counts. NBC says the list will likely evolve over time as new voices emerge.

“In the age of social media, ‘voice’ is democratizing, with fresh new perspectives about important issues facing local communities,” said Greg Scholl, president of NBC Local Integrated Media. “‘The 20′ will connect these relevant new voices with NBC’s local broadcast and online audiences to facilitate discussion and debate, and help shape local media coverage.”

‘The 20′ will be launched in New York, San Diego and DC this January, lostremote.com adds.

• BBC Editors Blog: BBC links up with Global Voices blog network
• Media release: New edition of McNae’s to launch at NCTJ seminar
• Media Release: Newspaper Society launches new audience measuring system
• The Next Web: Guardian to integrate with Facebook Connect
• Digital Strategy: Why Camden council is moving into hyperlocal websites

It’s all about microlocal/ultralocal/hyperlocal news – or whatever you want to call it – this week with a political news partnership for the New York Times and street-by-street news service EveryBlock.

The two sites have formed a data partnership, with info from the Times’ Represent catalogue of local elected representatives feed into EB’s mapped, postcode-searchable New York site.

Local news aggregation service outside.in has signed a similar deal with NBC ‘s local media network and built 650 ‘neighbourhood news pages’ as part of NBC’s ‘Local Only’ sites.

The pages, which cover nine cities, will feature news and ‘conversation’ (for this read blogs, Twitter and other social media buzz around a topic) aggregated by neighbourhood, a press release said.

A blog post on outside.in explains the benefits of the deal:

The beauty of these Neighborhood News Pages is that they really serve all of the key audiences:

• Consumers get more personalized and targeted news. What’s happening down the street from them.
• Advertisers can target their buys to a more specific audience that’s not just IP targeted, but actually engaged in content withing specific geographic boundaries; and
• NBC gets high quality hyperlocal editorial pages that cost a fraction of what it costs to build a ‘traditional’ editorial page and they actually are a great fit for Consumers and Advertisers

• Hyperlocal aggregator Everyblock launches new widget
• Towards a hyperlocal business model?
• More US publishers sign up for Briggs’ Newsgarden
• #soe09: Hyperlocal, mobile and experimentation for newspapers, say Brittin and Newland
• New local site and verticals for HuffPo

NiemanJournalismLab looks at the toolkit of NBC News’ digital journalist Mara Schiavocampo and discusses what workflows and equipment work best for her as a backpack, multimedia journalist.

Full story at this link…

• MediaShift Idea Lab: Interview with Alive in Baghdad’s Brian Conley
• Adam Westbrook: Shooting multimedia in Iraq – lessons learned
• Photo round-up: New metadata site and tools for photographers
• iPhone 4 a ‘serviceable web video camera in breaking news situations’
• Press Gazette: ‘Studio in a suitcase’ for Reuters journalists

Msnbc.com has plans for interactive coverage of voting results on a hyperlocal level, Charlie Tillinghast, president and publisher told Beet TV in this interview.

• Visitors to the site’s map will be able to click on states and counties to find results on national and local races.

• Msnbc.com will stream live events, on air coverage by the network and NBC affiliates.

• E&P: AP to move hosted video to NDN platform
• AP unveils tool to allow affiliates to upload news to its online video network
• Five tools to liven up local election reporting
• MSNBC’s Charlie Tillinghast: ‘There are no TV journalists anymore. There are videojournalists’
• Election 2.0: blogs, video and mobile streaming out in force for local election coverage

US TV broadcaster NBC is to roll out a series of nine local news sites this month.

The sites will be ‘less an extension of our TV stations and more of an online destination for the latest local news, information and entertainment,’ says the broadcaster’s president.

• Blood and Dust: Vaughan Smith on the rescue teams saving lives in Afghanistan
• Google announces new Chrome extension to block ‘content farms’
• Online Journalism Scandinavia: Should public broadcaster seek competitive advantage online by offering users content for free?
• Current TV’s Vanguard video journalism programme to launch in the UK
• #jpod: NUJ stages protest against BBC World Service cutbacks

Yesterday, Beet TV flagged up that a record number of users seeking online media information led to a seven per cent spike in traffic for Akamai, the delivery network which carries the internet flow for NBC, the BBC, Reuters and other news sites.

The current economic turmoil, hurricanes and the presidential campaign has helped boost the need for online information. At their peak, Akamai were registering 3.7 million requests per minute.

The spike follows a trend for online news sites doing well in times of financial strife: last month site traffic ‘exploded’ at the FT.com, as a result of the drop in share prices.

The need for information was felt on Wall Street, coinciding with a redesign of the Wall Street Journal Online. “Monday set an all time record of two million visitors”, a Wall Street Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high.  “These are pretty big numbers, considering monthly unique visitors are 17 million,” she said.

The irony is that financial disaster, hurricanes and presidential elections seem to be a good thing for the world of online media.

• Election traffic: WashingtonPost sees biggest jump but CNN leads
• Portfolio: WSJ quietly making big traffic strides
• Talking Biz News: Dow Jones restructuring
• Beet.tv: WSJ to expand live news video online
• Wall Street Journal: New York Times to start charging for online in January

Decision08, a competition organised by MySpace, NBC News and msnbc.com, has selected two citizen journalists to cover the 2008 US Democratic and Republican conventions.

Matt Britten and Sara Pat Badgley were chosen by more than 50,000 users who voted in the Decision08 convention contest, a press release said.

Entrants were asked to post a video to the Decision08 MySpace site answering the question ‘How will you stand out in the crowd and get the scoop no one else can?’

Below are the winning vids:

• MySpace launches cit-j project uReport
• The Washington Post and the cancelled lobbyist event
• NowPublic adds mobile upload feature with ShoZu
• An aggregation of aggregators: Journalism.me and Crowdstatus.com
• British Press Awards – the winners

Wikipedia updated its pages to account for the death of NBC News’ Washington bureau chief Tim Russert half an hour before a news alert was release by the Associated Press (AP), Brian Cubbison from the Syracuse Post-Standard blogs.

The first update to the online encyclopedia entry for Russert was made at 7:01pm (GMT) on June 13 to add the date of his death to the page – 35 minutes before AP’s alert.

Cubbison’s post interestingly links to a Businessweek article on the same phenomenon – a commenter on which points out that the IP address of the user who made the first amendment to Russert’s Wikipedia entry belongs to Internet Broadcasting Systems, the same company behind NBC’s website.

• paidContent: BusinessWeek sale to Bloomberg – told in links
• WikipediaVision
• A lesson in SEO from Charlie Brooker
• Editors’ Weblog: Details of Associated Press search landing pages
• Wikipedia: Giles Hattersley’s ‘missing’ Wikipedia page

The New York Film Academy has teamed up with NBC News to offer a year-long training course in ’21st Century broadcast journalism’.

The course aims to train the next generation of journalists to ‘be prepared to navigate the evolving landscape of digital journalism.’

Students will have the chance to attend ‘master classes’ conducted by NBC news staff and can go backstage on NBC news programmes to learn about production.

Each student produces pre-recorded news projects, using both single and multicamera, which they edit using Final-Cut Pro.

Comprehensive coverage doesn’t come cheap, though. At around £8,500 per semester, there may still be something to be said for learning on the job.

• WikipediaVision
• ‘Blood, Sweat and Media’ – BCU graduates exhibit final projects
• Any journalism students want to show off their news projects and sites?
• Comment: Response to Kelvin MacKenzie on shutting journalism colleges
• News teams nominated for 2011 BAFTAs

Those guys at Tribune know how to have a laugh don’t they? Take this ‘hilarious’ press release I received today about the US media group’s latest appointment:

Surely You Can’t Be Serious? Marc Chase – President Of Tribune Interactive!

Randy Michaels’ run of acquiring radio-management stars
came to a screeching halt today with Chase’s appointment

CHICAGO, April 7, 2008 — Another freaking Clear Channel
Communications executive on the payroll and this one’s been
named President of Tribune Interactive.

Tribune Broadcasting’s Randy Michaels’ past finally caught
up with him when Marc Chase obviously blackmailed his way
into a position he is not remotely qualified to hold.
Insiders are irate. Chase is a fraud. A source inside
Tribune HR, who wished to remain anonymous, pointed out that
Marc Chase’s resume (below) was obviously fabricated. First
of all, his name isn’t even Marc Chase–it’s Mark Thompson.
The whole thing is a sham.

MARC CHASE
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington DC 20500 202-456-1111

PROFESSINAL EXPERIENCE

Vocabulary Advisorist for George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
Washington DC, 2004-present

eBay
President of Buying Crap
San Jose, California 2003-2004

Google
Executive Vice President of Finding Crap Anywhere
Mountain View, California 2001-2002

Microsoft
Senior Executive Vice President of Technology and Stuff
Seattle, Washington, 2000-2001

CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX Television
Vice President of Watching TV A Lot
Los Angeles, California 1999-2000

Harvard University
Dean of School of Internetology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998

EDUCASHION

Nearly Graduated with Honers
School of Alabama in Atlanta Georgia 1985

COMMUNITY SERVICE

400 Hours (reduced from 600)
Judge gave time off for good behavior

Chase was quoted as saying, “Timing and infrared photography
are everything. I couldn’t be happier! I know Randy is
relieved to finally have me on Sam’s payroll.”

Tribune has undergone major changes in the past year, with
billionaire Sam Zell acquiring the company last April in a
complex deal that left it with $13 billion in debt. Since
then, Zell has brought in new executives to fill key roles.
This one takes the cake.

Last December, Zell hired Michaels — who helped Zell to
build Clear Channel into a radio behemoth that he could then
sell — to oversee Tribune’s broadcast and Internet
divisions. It is obvious Michaels has lost his mind with
this hire.

–By Hugh Jass – A Reputable Media Source

© 2008, Bogus Information, a division of Dewey, Cheatum, and
Howe. All Rights Reserved.

While you’re sewing you sides back together (and trying to make sense of the whole thing), you have to ask why? As Gawker points out Marc Chase has been hired – that’s about all you can determine from the message – but is it appropriate to send out a spoof release as the Tribune company faces mass redundancies?

• Blogs.vocalo.org: 119 words and phrases banned in WGN-AM radio newsroom
• NYTimes.com: LA Times journalists sue Sam Zell
• NYTimes: Tribune employees start protest blog against job cuts
• US-based Tribune files for bankruptcy but continues operating
• Editor and Publisher: WPNI head quits, Post takes greater control over web elements

From Wednesday news show clips from US broadcaster NBC will be offered as embeddable codes, according to a report from beet.tv.

As the beet.tv article points out, while such codes are offered for Reuters videos and videos on the Wall Street Journal website, this is the first time a major US network news operation has opted for this method of sharing content.

• Online media consumption up by seven per cent, as a result of financial strife
• AP pushing 250 stories a week through its newly launched YouTube channel
• Beet.tv: Why readers watch video on the NY Times and WSJ
• Advertising: Newspapers sign up with Zillow.com and Politico; UK radio station launches motor ads site
• #jpod: How news organisations are using Pinterest