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 get access to and read a vast amount of cultural analysis/journalism, comment, opinion, reviews and more online.
Via the net, you can find information (facts, stats etc) and people (interviewees, sources, voices, experts). You can access a wide range of current media and discover what's being talked about.
Here are some tools you could find useful:
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 - this is a blog search engine. You can use it to see which subjects bloggers are talking about, then find individual bloggers who you could then contact as potential sources.
Conversations There are lots of conversations going on online, on social networking sites like Facebook and via services like Twitter, a microblogging service which allows users to publish short details of what they're doing right now. Searching these sites can give you some useful leads.
Use the site operator on Google so you can search specifically in Facebook - add the keywords you want to search on before the site operator. You can also search Twitter via its Advanced Search.
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. 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 Most sites now offer RSS feeds of their content. This is a simple tool which sends out their content to you (or to one place on the net) to save you the trouble of going to a bunch of different sites. You can use a specific program on your computer to subscribe to a site's RSS feed or you can use a web-based service. Google Reader is a good one to try out at first.
Google News We've looked at it before and some of you were unconvinced - but it can be useful. 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. This looks at the search terms people are using most.
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