So, despite all my work to become a well-rounded multimedia and print journalist, I hope to work mainly as a print reporter in the future, perhaps capturing audio or video to go online for some stories, photos for others.

I enjoy weaving words and creating visual images for the reader’s mind. Whether it’s a story based on a 15-minute conversation or a two-hour-long interview, I try to find that uniqueness that makes a story a story and not just a string of words thrown together. When you move exclusively to audio and video — you lose the ability to shape what your reporting on, to tell a story in your own voice.

At the same time, I don’t believe that injecting a reporter into an audio or video production is an option, as that most times produces laughable results — especially with video (unless they know broadcast journalism well).

Audio and video do, however, have the ability to enhance a print story in its online form. In this day and age, no important event should be covered without the basic idea of putting audio soundslides with the story online. And I hope a future job lends me the ability to accomplish that when necessary.

Photos, in and of themselves, also have the ability to tell a story in a visual fashion that can be just as good, if not better, than print reporting alone. Add in audio or music and you get productions such as MediaStorm which tell stories from multiple angles that print journalism alone could not accomplish.

Overall, I think it’s important not to separate multimedia and print — or to have two distinct reporters for each of those categories. Instead, a more streamlined production could be made by having print reporters combine audio, video or photo slides to stories that lend themselves to that type of multimedia.

The focus, though, I hope will remain on the writing.

(Katharine Lackey is a senior majoring in journalism at Penn State and blogs at Beyond Print: Into the Prism)

The winner, Louise Midgely, a web developer at their north-east division, NCJ Media, won a cash prize and a share in future profits for her idea - to create a wikipedia specialising in the northeast area - wikinortheast.co.uk.

The site will offer a cache of digital archives documenting the region’s history.

People holding information about the region will be able to access and update the site with their own knowledge.

So far top searches include the Roman emperor Hadrian, Alan Shearer, and Tyneside gangster, Viv Graham.

Geotagged content has been around for a while now, but is starting to take effect in the UK media: last week, the Liverpool Echo, published a hyperlocal news map.

On Guardian.co.uk’s Inside Blog, Paul Carvill describes the geolocating process: reporters add their latitude and longitude to their article or blog post, and their location will appear in the RSS feed, which in turn can be fed into a Google map using a java script.

Online users can type in their postcode to find out what is being reported in their area, or alternatively click on an area of the map to source information from another location.

Netvibes had had a Facebook widget since August 2007, but according to the Mashable report, a new facility will allow users to integrate all their Netvibes activity feeds into Facebook and use the features that allow commenting, interaction and sharing.

“We face a significant challenge,” he says.

You can follow the online editor John Hassell’s Exploding Newsroom on Facebook, at the blog, and over at Kyte TV.

First up is an interview with the founder of the new UK-based search engine MSE360, which has attracted praise from both sides of the Atlantic with a three-tier display, clean design and other unique features such as virus alerts.

Insite is the handiwork of Journalism.co.uk’s consulting editor, Colin Meek.

Colin has been working on investigative and in-depth research projects for over 15 years as a journalist and policy analyst, and was founding editor of the online news channel on journalism.co.uk.

Over the last three years he has delivered courses in advanced internet and investigative research.

Since starting as a freelancer 10 years ago, Colin has worked for many clients including Which?, Health Which?, BMJ (British Medical Journal) Knowledge, The Times, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, journalism.co.uk, the Pharmaceutical Journal, the RSPGB and many others.

• Users can share their videos on the user-generated video hub Everyday Explorers, which was recently released in beta, and built with online community builder KickApps.
• User can upload photos to the ‘My Shot, Your Shot’ photo-sharing community and share music on the World Music Hub
• More interactive elements are in the pipeline …

An ABC press release said yesterday that the new certificates will detail monthly and daily unique users or browsers for media publishers. Visual charts will also be available.

The existing monthly audits can still be conducted using ABCe.

The ABC statement explained that by choosing to report their online figures on a six month basis, publishers ‘are committing to continuous reporting of their online activity’.

Speaking in the release, Jan Pitt, director of magazines, ABC, said, “the response has been good so far, these changes are to give publishers more options and enable them to demonstrate to advertisers and media buyers their cross platform performance.”

A guide to how the reporting options work can be downloaded from the ABC website, at www.abce.org.uk

Insite: ‘MSE360′ - what does the name mean?

“MSE Stands for Multi Search Engine, 360 for 360 degrees.”

Are you a UK team based in the UK?

“Yeah, we’re based in Kent, UK. All staff are based in the UK and we pride ourselves on that. Britain has some of the best minds when it comes to technology, after all, the internet was born from a British Inventor, Tim Berners-Lee.”

There are lots of search engines out there - some doing a great job and some that are not so good. Some of your friends must have suggested that the market is already crowded. How did you respond?

“Indeed, very much so, the market is at a stage where it’s hard to make any sense of a push, and we’ve been told many times that the market has no room for another search engine. We respond with the facts. 90% of the new search engines that launch do so without bringing new or exciting features. Cuil has a slightly different user interface, but that was limited and the technology really didn’t live up the hype. We don’t know if we shall succeed or die out, but if no one tries then what’s to push the larger search engines from improving? Percentage of search market is irrelevant to us, some people have told us that they will be switching to MSE from other search engines, so as long as we make a few people happy, I think we’ve done our job.”

OK - insite and journalism.co.uk readers are busy people. Why should they turn to MSE360 instead of ask.com? What is your main message to the heavy internet users?

“MSE360 was created to speed up the search process. Why navigate between blog search engines, web search engines, image search and Wikipedia if you can find it in one resource? MSE360 brings a lot of sources together in a simple layout. Our anti-virus features also keep the average user safer. We also, unlike other search engines, store no personal information. The fact of the matter is simple, MSE is like marmite, you’ll either love it or hate it.”

I once spent about and hour looking for someone on Google only to find that person as the top hit when I eventually gave up and used another search engine. What will it take to convince internet users - particularly those in the UK - that Google doesn’t have all the answers?

“Google is entrenched in the minds of the British population, and that’s the main challenge for us. We’ve got to change the perception that Google has all the answers. To do that we will be investing in schools to make sure students are not just informed about Google, but the wider range of search engines (such as Ask, Live and MSE). We also are going to focus an advertising campaign on the fact that Google doesn’t have all the answers. But the main factor in this is the technology; we can advertise as much as we want but unless we focus on improving the search our biggest advertising challenge - word of mouth - won’t succeed.

On your site you say you use your own robots and algorithms but you also use partners. Which other search engines do you partner with?

We’re slowly phasing out the external engines, but we use resources from Yahoo and Live Search.

OK - moving on to your unique selling points. Your service is fast, you flag sites that contain viruses, you allow community results and you offer a clean and easy-to-understand 3 tier layout. What else can users expect to see over the coming months?

We have some exciting new features in store. First of all our indexing methods will be changing to provide better results and we’ll be expanding community results and adding a voting system on all results. We plan to allow full customization of the search - from simple layout changes to algorithm changes. The user interface will be improved as will the speed. In the next month we’ll have user added modals which will allow users to add their own search methods, for example torrents or a certain site. 60% of our features come from user suggestions, so there is plenty to come!

One blog recently suggested that MSE360 doesn’t support advanced operator searches. It was very wrong because I’ve used your engine to carry out some complex searches using the advanced operators I can use on Google. Are there any operators you support that Google doesn’t?

We use the standard operators currently (AND OR ELSE etc) but I think this is something we have to improve on. We’re going to be adding content license operators (eg CC25) and algorithm operators, so the user will be able to find sites without adverts, with ‘x’ degree of adverts, etc. I can’t go into too many details, but we’ve got more coming!

Are you planning to implement an advanced search page?

Our beta version currently has an advanced search page, this will go live in the coming weeks.

Are you planning to incorporate any semantic technology into your search service?

We are, but I’m afraid I can’t go into detail on this area yet. In the coming months we’ll release more details in this exciting new area.

and issues of occupation, violence, and oppression in Kashmir:

In fact, we’ve got several very important challenges to deal with in the next 10 years, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and this economic meltdown thing, that are going to make or break whether civilization progresses past the age of computers. Journalists, fortunately, still have the task of translating all of these issues, as objectively as they can, in to terms the public can understand.

The Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and chaplain to the Stock Exchange, Peter Mullen, has been widely criticized for posts on his blog, including: a poem about gay marriage; a suggestion that proponents of gay culture should have a tattoo across their buttocks; and a call for Gay Pride parades to be outlawed.

Nonetheless the priest will continue to write his column for the Northern Echo, which can be read online.

The Northern Echo’s editor, Peter Barron, wrote on his own blog this week that he had advised Mullen to issue an apology to the Press Association, and that Mullen would be writing another apology in the Northern Echo next week, even though the original comments were not ever posted on the Northern Echo site.

Mullen has now deleted his blog but the offensive comments can be read in this Google cache (via Zefrog).

On a side note, if you now search priest + sodomy, on Google most the results return articles about Peter Mullen. Ironic, that.

What’s extra nice is that the Dipity widget lets readers look at the info as a timeline, map, flipbook or list. Using the third-party service helps the newspaper get extra mileage out of what are no doubt already popular online stories.

The feature has also been made ‘public’ through dipity’s site to help drive traffic back to the Evening Leader.

The tool has previously been used by the Manchester Evening News for its coverage of a proposed congestion charge for the city; and the Liverpool Daily Post to create a 24-hour snapshot of Liverpool as this year’s European Capital of Culture.

Lloyd’s List has created a microsite to support its ‘Save our Seafarers’ campaign complete with news updates, video and an interactive map of the latest attacks.

The campaign was launched in reaction to a rise in piracy attacks off the Somalian coast. According to Lloyd’s, 11 vessels have been hijacked and 234 seafarers are currently being held.

Tahmina Shafique from BMB Mott MacDonald consultancy firm told Journalism.co.uk that they “would essentially want these experts to share their expertise and also provide input to our plan of improving the business sections.”

IFC BICF, who are working with BMB Mott MacDonald, will cover the costs of airfare and accommodation. The workshops and discussion sessions will be tailored to the expertise of the visiting journalists.

The event is part of the ‘Stakeholders Engagement Program’, which aims ‘to build government and non-government stakeholder awareness and advocacy capacity on investment climate issues and the need for reforms for sustainable private sector development in Bangladesh.’

The firms are working with the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce (DCCI) to host a series of events from October 30 – November 3 with the goal of making the country ‘a solid investment location, and establish partnering possibilities with local and foreign investors.’

Business journalists who are interested in the opportunity and would like more information should contact Tahmina Shafique as soon as possible, by emailing tahmina at mottmacbd dot com.

Ecoforyou.co.uk will be free to readers offering environmental news, features, interviews and lifestyle tips. The interactive site will include live-links, video, audio and a ‘digital page turn format’, powered by YUDU and hosted by Planet Ink Ltd.

Without a print edition, ecoforyou is aiming to be a ‘100% carbon neutral publication’. The platform, YUDU, advertises itself as a carbon neutral company, off-setting its emissions by donating money to a carbon management company.

The site is relying on marketing through social networks with readers encouraged to use ‘forward to a friend’ buttons.

“We hope that ecoforyou will not only appeal to individual readers but businesses campaigners and industry leaders too,” said founding director, Gerry Cassidy, in a press release.

“They can easily email ecoforyou to their clients, colleagues and workforce and maintain their green credentials, without having to go to the additional expense of their publication.”

Ecoforyou will is not the only digital offering promoting green issues, the BBC already has a well established site, bbc.green.com.

Other eco websites include:

http://www.bbcgreen.com - lifestyle green living.

http://www.ecorazzi.com/ - offers a mixture of celebrity gossip and environmental issues.

http://www.treehugger.com/ - ’strives to be a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information.’

http://www.ecogeek.org/ - publishes stories daily about innovations that are saving the planet.

Any other favourite green news sites?