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5th Anniversary of war in Iraq :: Google map

There's a huge amount of coverage of this anniversary, both broadcast and print media. C4's "Happy Birthday Iraq" season starts today - a week long look at the past five years of the conflict. It's been very difficult to try and manage the scale of all of this. It's a subject that expands beyond your reach the moment you start thinking about it. Online we've got tons of content, both written and video, news footage, personal accounts and film clips.

One of the things I was keen to do was give some kind of geographical context, and to try to promote C4 as an editor of choice - point to where the interesting content elsewhere on the web is. I wanted to help people find content beyond the usual news sites they might visit. So we've put a considered selection of C4 and non-C4 content into a google map. You can start with Baghdad and zoom in/out, and we've chosen the satellite view deliberately - I don't know about you but being able to see the streets of places I only associate with news footage somehow brings it home.

See what you think. I don't think it will change the world, but as a way of navigating content I think it's interesting.

Alex Thompson is blogging from Afghanistan

I really like his style:

Every now and then the Marines, it seems, move into their territory and they all have a big fight, or a small fight, or just a fight fight. Then it stops for a while. Then it starts up all over again.

In the interludes the Taliban have taken to calling up. As one Marine remarked to me today, it's a bit like the British and Germans on the Western Front in the First World War.

One of them was this morning. Lots of banter about why don't you come up here and attack us properly and what's wrong with you lot of infidels - that kind of thing.

Full piece here, with more here and here.

(I'm not going to go into the lack of blogging infrastructure here. Or that I'm wrong to call it a blog because technically that's not how blogs work blah blah blah. What can I say... we're working on it. In the meantime lets just enjoy some great writing, shall we?)

Slideshow: Kenya in turmoil

The C4 News online team have produced a fantastic slideshow account of the post-election conflict in Kenya. Amazing photography and chilling commentary (both from Jonathan Miller).

click to play

Lone Remaining Burmese Blogger Uses Lightweight Messaging Service to Broadcast to the World

Using a small app, kind of like a cross between IM and twitter. Plus awesome amounts of courage and resilience.

A model for the 21st century newsroom

Paul Bradshaw has an interesting post about a possible new newsroom production process. I really like his iterative model. Using media tools as a way of simultaneously communicating and drafting a story is really compelling. I wonder what kind of cultural shift would be needed in a newsroom, or headshift for the staff themselves, to do this? Perhaps I'm being unduly negative, but the old model of getting the scoop to print is well entrenched. Tweeting a breaking news headline may feel to some like giving the game away. Particularly for big media organisations used to having to compete in a particular timeslot around similar agendas. I do love the idea of blogging as a way of (possibly collaboratively) building a story, context, depth etc. which is made into a polished package later on.

There's a lot of food for thought here. I'm doing a lot of thinking around the tension between "traditional" breaking news websites and news blogs. My own view is that they should be more similar than not. But working out the balance is interesting, particularly in a traditional broadcast environment. Interesting times. Oh, and I like the news diamond very much.

Celebrating 20 years in a dying industry

A nice piece from David Callaway on the evolution of news dissemination, and the enduring need for good journalism.

Back in 1987, it was widely assumed that newspapers were dying. The post-Watergate rush to journalism was over. Circulations were down. And new technologies were threatening. At one point, the hot new thing was to deliver news by fax machine, and papers were going to die because readers would be able to get news quicker by fax. They would even be able to tailor the type of news they wanted to receive. Imagine that.

...this is not the beginning of the end for journalism. It wasn't 20 years ago either. It's a bull market for those who can write a sentence and tell a story and know how to do it across the mediums of print, Web, audio, video and mobile. The stories are there for the taking.

It's good oop north: hyperlocal user-generated news

Trinity Mirror are pulling in enough user generated content to publish six ad-supported local freesheets a week. This is so cool. They've rolled out a network of blogs tied to local postcodes. The local paper (Teesside Gazette) still produces content, but a significant amount of stuff comes from the blogs. On its own the paper wouldn't be able to generate that much hyperlocal news, but people with a vested interest in their own area can. As Wired's Assignment Zero project found, contributors volunteering to contribute about something they're passionate about will often tackle them in greater depth and detail than professional journalists. The added plus is that any specific blog could become a focus of local community/activity and be used for more than just generating news.

My family live up in this neck of the woods (there be dragons), so I'll pick up a copy next time I'm up there. One thing I especially like about this is that it's an innovation that hasn't been driven by a major urban centre. Go small/medium towns up north!

(via Seamus McCauley, who also has an interesting post on the core business of newspapers.)