Following Monday’s launch of their in-house journalism training website, the BBC plans to make the site more widely available to the public.

The corporation’s college website aims to create a massive training resource with plans to release the material to the public later this year. This could have a dramatic effect on journalism with the trend towards citizen journalism over the last year.

The site has 500 pages with over 40 video clips giving practical exercises, how-to guides and theoretical discussions on the practice of journalism to stimulate debate. The site is split into ten sections ranging from BBC values to the future of journalism. Everyday the site will lead with three new stories so that readers can learn from current issues in the news.

The college's director, Vin Ray, told Press Gazette: 'I want, by the end of this year, to have an external site. 'There are some legal issues about rights, fair trading and the tone, because it is very much directed at the BBC, but I plan to do a bit of work this year on making it an external site.'

Scoopt and Sony Ericsson have teamed up to bring out the ultimate mobile/citizen journalist phone.

 

The top range K800i that has a supper 3.2 megapixel camera, and comes with a link in main menu of the phone to sign up to Scoopt, which also prompts the downloading a V-card for your address book too

 

Both phones having cracking Cyber-Shot cameras picture blogging tools push email and RSS feeds check it out here

 

This probably will mean that the 6 megapixel mobile camera phone is only just around the corner (out in 2007) for mainstream purchase, which I think will be highly significant.

When you consider that many local newspapers are still using the Nikon D1 and its variants that has an image sensor of 4 megapixels you start to see why; image size.

However we might need to wait a bit longer before a 4-6 megapixel point and shoot matches the quality of a DSLR, but at least the picture editors have some room to crop images and possibly do half page!

 

 

Tom Glocer (CEO of Reuters) has given a speech outlining a deal with Canon and Adobe to provide software that will indicate if the images have been manipulated in any way.

 

But further interest is that Tom has stated "we no longer have a choke-hold on the flow of information, whether technological, professional or financial." and  "We don’t decide what people see and when they see it.  They have demanded and created the Two-Way Pipe."

 

This distrust and demand of big media institutions is why we have citizen journalism, people at a news event, soon realise that what was written in a local paper, is vastly different from what they have seen. It would also appear that Reuters are going to sell their news on truth and being unbiased reporting and then warns that some sites have their own agenda and are used to recruit!

 

One has to ask why then, have Reuters set up to handle Citizen Journalists images and video so they can act as a choke-hold perhaps?

 

Quote: Tom Glocer's Blog