Visualize what the media are saying with Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon.

Media Cloud is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. Read more about the project or give it a spin here.

Add Google News to your website

From the Official Google Blog:

The world is a quickly changing place and it’s getting harder and harder to stay on top of the news. With this in mind, we’ve just released a Google News–based element for webmasters and developers. This makes it easy to integrate headlines and previews from Google News into any webpage, and for newspapers to reach new audiences across the web. Whether your visitors are interested in business, entertainment or fashion, you control the types of stories in your personal news show. You can input keywords like “Obama ” or “Superbowl” or broad topics like “world news” or “politics.” For more information, check out our post on the AJAX Search API Blog or get started with our wizard to automatically generate the code for you.

Journalists toolbox

The Journalist’s Toolbox, newly sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists, has tons of links to all sorts of useful web sites, from public records directories to Find-a-Grave.

Ten things every journalist should know in 2009

10 things, with links to more information about those things. Examples:

2. How to use RSS feeds to gather news and manage them using filtering techniques (basic or advanced).

7. You do not have to own, or even host, the technology to innovate in journalism and engage your readers. There is a plethora of free or cheap tools available online, so there is no excuse for not experimenting with them.

10. Learn more about privacy. You can find a lot of information about people online, especially via social networking sites, but think carefully about the consequences. And bear in mind that it cuts both ways, if you do not do it carefully, your online research could compromise your sources.

And 7 more really useful things.

Tools for news

Launched a couple of weeks ago: Chris Amico’s Tools for News , a nicely annotated database of tools for online journalists, by online journalists.  See notes about the site on his Eyes East. “And it’s free! Free as in beer!”

Cox is number 2 in 6 unusual things owned by newspapers

Manheim Auctions comes in as number 2 on the mental_floss list. RT @10000Words.

Newspapers that use Twitter: December update

99 more in December than in November. See the whole list here at graphicdesignr.

People still buy newspapers. As long as they remain cheaper than drop cloths.

True story.

A guy asks if he can cut in front of me in the grocery checkout line. He’s just buying a newspaper. I notice he’s not buying the paper I work for, so I say, “Sure, if you buy the other paper instead of that one. I work for the Palm Beach Post.”

He looks at me blankly.

I say, “Oh, go ahead. It’s not like we really compete with them anymore anyway.”

He pays for the paper and thanks me. On his way out he turns back and says, “I’m not going to read it. I’m just using it for painting.”

More Journalistopia links

25+ of Danny’s Favorite Multimedia Tools. Not just video, audio and photo tools, but also polls, timelines, and ethics. And another one from last week, 5 Ways to Monitor Your News Competition Online.

Life photo archive hosted by Google

“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.”