This week's session

We're going to pick up on some of the areas we didn't manage to get to last week - in other words we're going to look at some of the debates surrounding the contribution of blogs to political journalism and public opinion and also think a bit about what citizen journalism really means...

I'm going to hand out some things to read - but if you want to read things online, we're going to look at a recent Guardian piece by Oliver Kamm, a well known blogger/commentator, attacking political bloggers, a response by Norman Geras and Kamm's reply...

We'll also look at different responses to the recent instances of 'citizen reporting/journalism' - specificallly, a piece by Tim Luckhurst in the Independent, about the mobile phone footage of Saddam Hussein's execution, and a piece by John Naughton about cameraphone images and 7/7.

After that, I want you to look at the Virginia Tech shootings - and think about the role citizen reporting has played in this - is it a positive role?