"What will the role of the journalist be in ten years time?" Your guess is as good as mine.

Yesterday, I gave a talk to some journalists at the BBC about the impact of new media on journalism.

One of the questions I was asked was: "What will the role of the journalist be in ten years time?"

I didn't give a particularly good answer. (Certainly, nothing of note to put on the blog!)

I haven't thought about it much and to be honest, I'm not sure of the value of spending too long thinking about what will happen that far ahead. Here's the BBC website ten years ago. We've come a long way since then. I'm not sure many people could have predicted it.

The enquirer isn't the only one who wants to know what the future of journalism will be though. (I've already been to some 'future of journalism' conferences; I'm sure I'll go to more in the future.)

She pointed out that she felt more journalism involved "facilitating" other people's work. By which she meant receiving information and processing contributions from the people formerly known as the audience.

I wonder if this trend will continue. If it does the two concept audience-journalist divide will continue to crumble to the point where it may no longer be at all meaningful. The question: 'who is the journalist?', might be a more interesting question than: 'what is journalism?', (though the two are obviously related).

P.S. If you have a crystal ball, you can gaze in there now and stick the answer in the comments, or go old-school and send me a postcard.

More 'Gaza media coverage' on the soon to be improved Frontline Blog

I've got a couple of other bits on Gaza up on the Frontline blog.

One post on War 2.0 and another about discrepancies in the figures the Israelis are giving out on the number of rockets being fired into Gaza.

The latter was picked up by The Guardian's live Gaza blog.

Incidentally, the Frontline blog is currently undergoing a makeover and I'm hoping that very soon you'll be able to bask in the shiny new glow of the updated blog.

From my point of view, it should mean blogging will be much more straightforward. I'm looking forward to being liberated from the blogging dark ages where moving photos involves coding in the phrase 'align="right"', (by hand), and resizing means taking out a calculator.

(Maybe one day I'll look back at these days with a sense of nostalgia. But probably not.)

Gaza media coverage - the BBC and blogs

If you regularly plod through the content of this blog you'll get the score by now.

I imagine some of you might be bored of clicking through to another website, but then Google has built something of an empire on this concept so it can't be so bad.

The post on this topic is here.

Twitter blog

Twitter facts is a blog that does exactly what it says on the tin.

You can even find out the state of the Twittersphere in Malaysia. If you want to. I'm not sure why you would want to. But you might. And it's there for you, if you do.

Gaza media coverage - alternative voices and blogs

Part two of an unintended series on Gaza media coverage on the Frontline blog.

This post was sparked by a commenter who pointed out that the media often end up recycling the same old Israeli voices.

I've also linked to a few blogs which might provide an alternative perspective and dug out a BBC Editor's blog post from the archive. (If anyone knows where I can get some virtual dust for my delicious account, let me know).

Gaza media coverage - the propaganda war

I've put up a post synthesising a few bits and pieces about Gaza and media coverage on my Frontline blog.

BBC and blogs in December (last month's reading this year)

Happy New Year!

Back at work then, though blogging will still be sporadic while I await delivery of a new laptop. (These efforts were in vain). Some undergraduate essays on the Experience of War are keeping me entertained in the mean time.

Just been catching up on some reading. Here's what I've found...

• I got a great comment on my piece about the end of Island Blogging which is better than the post itself because it's written by an Island blogger. The Island bloggers have a new website here.
  

• The BBC World Have Your Say blog asks readers what they want to see on the blog. And explain why they've been deleting some comments recently.

• The BBC Blog network has another new blog called 'Journalism Labs'. In it's first post it publishes the results of an experiment with Apture linking on the BBC website. This E-Consultancy website claims the BBC still doesn't know how to link out.
  

• BBC News blogs guru Giles Wilson defends the BBC against accusations in the Daily Mail that the BBC's blogs do not conform to the organisation's high journalistic ideals. There are some interesting comments here as well representing a wide range of views on the Corporation's blog offering.

• Kevin Marsh at the BBC's College of Journalism tells us what he's learnt this year. Among other things, he learnt that the BBC was blogging without realising it:

"We did a lot of work in the middle of the year around how organisations use networking to support learning. It was good work, but it overlooked one thing; BBC journalists were already sharing learning, links and intelligence like crazy - millions of transactions a day amongst the 8,000 or so journalists. They were writing stuff that was in every respect blogging ... it's just that no-one called it that."