Trudi McDonald’s blog_Irish Twitter Times

Here, Trudi looks at the pace of news today, which is almost instantaneuos, making it known to the public almost as soon as it breaks. Twitter seems to be helping make this revolutionary change to having things immediately and Trudi uses a great example of a court case she herself was at to demonstrate the speed at which news now operates.

Mariosa Molloy’s blog_”The Essential Site for Journalists’ like serious journalism… also to blog and to Twitter”

This blog gives us the run  down on the site journalism.co.uk as well as on blogs. Mariosa sums the site up with, “It looks out for the needs of the journalist” giving the usual news feeds to the essential job opportunites and room for freelancers to advertise.

Niamh Mongey’s blog_Historic Newspapers to go online

This blog shows us that what was always in print and in the past is now  becoming modernised and more importantly digitised. Historical Welsh newspapers being available online, does as Niamh comments, pose advantages. This new, more convenient proposal means that we can access reliable newspaper information from times gone by very easily, and from the comfort of our own homes and laptops.

Students still drawn to journalism despite industry decline

Despite the decline in the newspaper industry, students are still flocking in record numbers to study journalism at third level especially in the American journalism colleges, according to the the Capital Times.

By the end of 2008 American daily newspapers had slashed jobs by 11.3% and in 2009, as we know, the situation is worsening with entire papers going under, cutting huge amounts of staff or resorting to being solely online. But for some reason there has been an increase in the amount enrolling for undergraduate journalism courses. The University of Georgia reported almost 200,000 students enrolling in 2007, an increase of 41.6% from 1997. Even last year, universities such as those at Columbia, Maryland and Stanford saw significant increases in the amounts enrolling.

Twitter bites back

Twitter strikes back on the Telegraphs news website after they decided to stream all comments that contained “#budget” directly to its Budget 2009 homepage, hoping for up to date responses of what people were thinking, however it didn’t quite go as well as planned as the Guardian reported.

The comments were not moderated and it wasn’t long before twitter users realised this and took full advantage to post comments on whatever they wanted, budget related or otherwise. The Guardian posted some of their favourite comments. One comment really sums it all up “Silly paper messing with technology it doesn’t understand #budget”.

Newspaper decline accelerates

Online news is on the up while newspapers seem to be declining further and further with the New York Times reporting more than a 7% decline over the last six months for American papers compared to figures at the same time last year. Online newspapers websites for the first quarter have had a 10.5% increase in their audience.

All but the Wall Street Journal seem to be declining as they have seen a 0.6% gain in readership perhaps with their content of business and finance being so relevant to the current economic climate. Levels of decline have also varied considerably between papers. For example the New York Post declined 20.6% and the Chicago Sun-Times only 0.4%.

Sudan paper closes over death wish

A prestigious pro- government newspaper in Sudan has been closed down after it’s editor published his wish for a senior official from the south of the country to be killed because of his objection to non- Muslims being subjected to sharia law.

The editor, Isaac Ahmed Fadlallah, of newspaper Al- Wifaq, clashed with Yasir Arman from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement after his remarks, particularly on flogging as a punishment for adultery, which he felt non- Muslims should not be punished under even though Islamic law has been imposed across the whole of Sudan since 1983.

Northern Sudan is mainly Muslim while the South is mainly Christian or aminist and tensions over this as well as over disputed boundary areas with oil reserves are rife.

Apple applications victories and downfalls

Apple’s online application store has hit one billion downloads after opening only nine months ago. The store provides applications for the iPhone and iPod touch and is available in 77 different countries with over 35,000 differenet applications to chose from.

The person to download the 1 billionth application was a thirteen year old boy from West Connecticut, USA. He was awarded a $10,000 gift card for iTunes, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule backup system for the Mac, and a MacBook Pro, according to an article on informationweek.com

Recession hits Microsoft

For the first time in 23 years, since Microsoft has become a public company, its has suffered a drop in profits leaving its third quarter profit at $3 billion, down 32% from this time last year. The company are expecting this shortfall to continue for at least another quarter according to their Chief Financial Officer Christopher Liddel as reported on bizjournals.com.

After cutting 5,000 jobs in January, Microsoft reported $290 million worth in severance charges. Revenue for the company is also down approximately $800 million according to bizjournal.com.

Pulitzer Prize awards acknowledge online only news organisations

For the first time this year the Pulitzer Prize awards have opened all 14 categories to news organisations that operate solely online, as reported by CNN. While they picked up no prizes this year, it has shown a recognition for the news coming from outside the traditional press, somewhere news is perhaps headed in the future.

“We’ve clearly hit a point now where we’ve seen the audience migration to the Web accelerate” said Amy Mitchell from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Previously online only news websites were only allowed to enter for awards in the categories of breaking news coverage and breaking news photography. Since 2006, newspapers with websites were allowed to submit website content to all 14 categories, but websites for print magazines and broadcasting outlets are still not allowed to enter.