This week's class is cancelled

But I hope you already know that. I'll rearrange a session to make up for the one we're going to miss, but we can pin down the right date and time for this when we meet again next Friday (April 11th).

That session will cover research online - the net makes it really easy to find and consume a wide range of media. I'm not just talking about pure news here. You can read a vast amount of cultural analysis/journalism, comment, opinion, reviews and more online.

One of the key skills you need to develop as journalists (whatever medium you work in) is media literacy. Whatever your interest (music, sport, fashion), you need to read widely and really get a sense of what's going on in your field, what stories are being covered by who and why.

So we're going to look at some tools that will help you broaden the range of media you consume. We'll focus on:

Bloggers As we've discovered, they can help you find interesting stories online and place those stories in useful/illuminating contexts. How do we find those bloggers and keep track of them? One way is to use Technorati.

Social bookmarking The idea here is that you can bookmark sites online and share those bookmarks with others in ways that let you find more interesting stuff. Del.icio.us was the pioneer in this field. Some sites have adapted the social bookmarking idea for news and news editing - one of the best known is Digg, which we've looked at before. Next week, we'll go into it in more detail. David Cohn wrote an interesting piece for the Columbia Journalism Review about how he uses Digg, its increasing influence and the ethical dilemmas he faces as a result.

Feeds We've looked at news feeds before. We'll go into this a bit more today. You can use special news reader programs to subscribe to news feeds. It's a good way of scanning a lot of news/information in one go. You can also use web-based services to do something similar. We'll try out Google Reader as an easy way into using feeds.

Google News Again, we've looked at this before - next week, we're going to look again to test out its usefulness as a journalistic research tool. To give it its proper technical title, Google News is an automated news aggregator. It gives you access to a wide variety of perspectives on big news stories. We're going to look at how you might personalise it or use Google technology to get recommended news stories. We're also going to look at Google Zeitgeist.

If you get a chance, have a look at all these sites and try them out before next week.