Instead, he's going to mine those links to create a real-time news service that would work somewhat like Twitter trends, except that it would track the hottest links rather than the most-used words. The result would be a Digg-like news service comprised of links determined to be important by bit.ly's analysis engine.

“We're seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month,” said Cohen. “Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web. Sometimes that’s humorous stuff — the other day, the most shared video we saw on the web was William Shatner performing a dramatic reading of Sarah Palin’s farewell address.

“But it’s also occasionally very serious. We were able to see the Neda video out of Iran trending well before CNN linked it in, and we’ve begun to refine our capabilities there to be able to pinpoint stories like that.” He said part of this technique involves looking for links being shared by unlike people, because that means they have universal appeal.

It's called "Tower Ticker," which from December 1948 to October 1981 was the name of the Chicago Tribune’s popular people column. This isn't that. It's more an expansion of the Tribune column I have been writing for the last 3˝ years (and, in some ways, the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News columns I wrote for two decades before that). But I liked the name, the handle was available and worth dusting off for a revival.

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists is thinking about adding a blogging category to its annual awards contest.

At its recent meeting, the NSNC board of directors passed a motion to ask the contest chair to present a proposal for such a category.

Current categories cover general-interest, humor, notes/items, and online writing. Award winners are announced during the NSNC's annual June conference.

Over the past few months, the airline took one of their lucky employees through a whirlwind tour of the company as she video blogged the entire experience. Now, they're looking for a Southwest fan to hand off the reins. The lucky person will be assigned a year's worth of excitement as he or she jetsets around the country, video blogging on the entire airline, experience and any excitement that's going on in the Southwest community.

Obviously the airline is going to pick someone that's quirky, loves flying and is great on video, so try to emulate those traits if you don't have them and put together a one minute video application.

Carl C. Icahn took his first steps into the Internet earlier this year by beginning a blog. Now he's about to get some help.

The activist shareholder has hired Dane Hamilton, a hedge fund reporter at Thomson Reuters, to work on his Web site, The Icahn Report, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Hamilton is expected to contribute original reporting and analysis to the site, augmenting Mr. Icahn's own voluble opinions on the state of corporate America.

Mr. Hamilton will start working for the site this month, these people said. He declined to comment; Mr. Icahn could not be reached for comment.

The LAT hopes to put Goldstein's knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.

The Big Picture is one of our favorite columns at the paper, and we're excited to see what it evolves into as a longtime journo wades into the world of full-time blogger. No word yet on whether he'll be reporting in his underwear (we highly recommend it).

That's the idea behind launching the Big Picture blog. As much as I've loved writing a once-a-week column, the world of entertainment and pop culture is moving so fast that it's become impossible to keep up with all the action without weighing in more often than once a week. Over the past few years, I've found myself addicted to reading blogs. The best ones offer a wonderfully brainy, personal and irreverent way of seeing the world. You'll see the paper now has 40-plus blogs, with more being launched all the time.

My guess is that someday soon our blogs will be the backbone of the paper. Journalists have discovered, to our chagrin, that information is everywhere these days. But readers still crave informed analysis and lively writing, which is something we can focus on as newspapers make the transition from mass circulation entities to niche-oriented publications. So while I've got lots to learn about the blogging life--and will surely stumble many times along the way--I'm eager to be a part of that new conversation.

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was "heavy-handed" and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet.

So here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them, we don't link to them. They're banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

I don't know what the A.P. will do. But neither do the bloggers calling for a boycott of the A.P. (By the way, that's a silly concept as none of these blogs actually pays the A.P. any money. If CBS News or the Huffington Post - an A.P. client - launched a boycott, that might hurt.)

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Mike Koehler, deputy sports editor at The Oklahoman, has started a new blog/Web project called www.prayingforpapers.com, designed to bring help through prayer where it is needed, as newspaper-industry challenges continue to mount.

"The goal of my site is to update visitors on who needs prayer in our business," Koehler tells E&P. "This will include recent layoffs, the business in general, as well as leaders and people with specific prayer requests. It's for Christians and non-Christians alike."

This is a troubling time in the newspaper business. Every day we hear stories from papers that are laying off employees and struggling to stay afloat.

Our idea at Praying for Papers is to encourage anyone who is touched by this shift in our industry to include it each day in their prayer life.

This includes:

* Praying for your brothers and sisters in the business who have lost their jobs or may be in danger of losing their jobs - as well as their families.

* Prayers for the leaders of our business to do the right thing in their decision-making, having them keep in mind what Christ would do.

* Praying for the people in our business who are far from God.

"There was no conflict of interest between my writing for Kissing Suzy Kolber and my work for The Washington Post. The blog is not a journalistic endeavor and it is not something I was paid for until I revealed my identity. It is a humor blog about the NFL, whereas my job for the paper was to cover local news in a suburban county outside Washington, D.C. It is beat that has nothing to do with a professional football league.

"I also find it troubling that I was summarily fired for engaging in something that is core to the spirit of The Washington Post: full disclosure. Even if editors had a problem with the language used in the blog, they should have been able to respect that my goal was not to defame The Post, but to be forthcoming with my readers."

I've just debuted a new website/blog designed to be a resource for ideas, tips and advice for online news publishers. It's called GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, and it's NOT another industry news blog. The focus is exclusively on advice. I hope you'll find it useful.

I soft-launched the site yesterday, so hardly anyone knows about it. I'd love it if a few of you checked it out and maybe commented on the early posts. My intent is to post a tip a day. There will be ideas on how to increase traffic and earn more money, primarily. I'm aiming for actionable tips and advice.

"Politics has become more accessible to young people," Schumer said. "They didn't really get into TV news the way my generation did. You know, when I was younger, the national news was sort of the national living room. That is not even close to true. Everyone read Time magazine or Newsweek. Hardly anyone does anymore."

The second-term senator credited specifically bloggers and the Internet for early successes in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. According to U.S. News and World Report, from January 3 (day of the Iowa caucuses) to February 5 (Super Tuesday), 19.1 million Americans cast a ballot in a Democratic primary (or caucused as a Democrat) versus just 13.1 million on the Republican side in all the nominating contests.

"Instead things are more fractured, but the bloggers and the Internet has sort of become the medium of choice," Schumer said. "And it's gotten young people involved and excited in politics."

"But I think it's different this time," Schumer said. "I think the Internet is much deeper and more pervasive. Howard Dean used it - it was a brand new thing, 'What is this?' Now it's part of the working world. Hillary's raising a lot of money on the Internet too - not as much as Barack, but she still is. But to me, more the motivation of young people ultimately is, this world is a different world and we better get hold of it and I think that's a great motivation."

Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, he said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."

The mix of free and paid content will continue to be tweaked, however, and a good portion of Wall Street Journal content increasingly is available free online. Free content includes the Journal's breaking-news alerts and personal-finance and lifestyle content, as well as videos, blogs, podcasts and other interactive elements. This month, the Journal began offering free access to all of its Opinion section.

Online-only subscription prices are expected to jump $20 to $119 a year as early as March. Print subscribers pay $49 a year for a subscription to the Web site. The last price increase came 18 months ago. As recently as this week, the Journal was offering online-only introductory subscriptions for $79 to bring in new subscribers, a common practice in the publishing industry. The bundled online-print price isn't scheduled to increase.

For the past several months, the paper also has run a test with Google News: Online readers can come to the Journal's site from Google News and read any individual article free but are blocked from entering many other parts of the site. The goal is to capitalize on the traffic that comes from search engines and let users sample the Journal to encourage them to subscribe.

Anchoring the changes is today's launch of the "Readers' Representative Journal," a new blog (http://www.latimes.com/readersrep) aimed at bringing the public deeper into the process of how editorial decisions are made. Hosted by readers' representative Jamie Gold and assistant readers' representative Kent Zelas, the journal will feature a Q&A-oriented conversation to engage reporters and editors in addressing reader queries and observations. Among the rotating features will be "Ask a Staffer," a chance to get the story behind the story; "Whatever Happened to ... ," where readers can ask for updates on past stories; and grammar critiques. Users will be able to view a staff directory, peruse the L.A. Times ethics guidelines and get answers to frequently asked questions about newsroom practices, as well as outside-the-newsroom operations such as how to buy back copies. The Readers' Representative Journal will explore virtually anything readers want to know about the editorial operation of the Los Angeles Times, online and in print.

"The ongoing changes reflect The Times overarching goal of becoming a more transparent and integrated news organization," said Los Angeles Times editor, James O'Shea. "Most important, we're further opening the lines of communication with our readers and using new ways to make the newsroom more accessible."

ProPublica, when fully staffed in 2008, will include 24 fulltime reporters and editors, the largest staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting. ProPublica will be supported entirely by philanthropy and will provide the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article.

Commenting on the new organization Mr. Steiger said, “ProPublica will focus exclusively on journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them. We will be non-partisan and non-ideological, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality and fairness.” He continued, “We will look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power. But we will also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and the media when they appear to be exploiting or oppressing those weaker than they, or when there is evidence that they are abusing the public trust.”

Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson will report to Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News and publisher of msnbc.com, but otherwise, Newsvine will continue to operate independently, Tillinghast said.

Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com's newsroom, "is just a great fit."

"Newsvine is local, small, nimble - they don't come with a lot of things you don't want," he said, such as complicated partnerships and contracts. "There isn't a lot to rearrange."

1. Increased exposure for Newsvine writers. Remember when Killfile broke the news of the Virginia Tech shooting 22 minutes before the Associated Press? What about when Corey Spring got an exclusive interview with Dave Chappelle? When important moments like these occur on Newsvine, why shouldn't they also be put in front of 29 million people on msnbc.com? What about when a Newsviner builds up an audience for a weekly entertainment column like Steve Watts' Lost in the Vines? Why shouldn't great content like that be put on an even bigger stage? We think it should, and although Newsvine and msnbc.com will remain independent brands, we're going to spend the next several months figuring out ways to get the best content in front of the biggest audiences possible.
2. A bigger, more diverse community. Msnbc.com's user base is spread across the world in every age, income, and demographic group. You'd be hard pressed to find a town in the United States which doesn't count some of its residents as readers. It is our hope that eventually, readers of both Newsvine and msnbc.com will be able to jump from site to site and share in the benefits that each destination offers.
3. Speed, reliability and uptime. As a cost-conscious startup, Newsvine has made do with an efficient hardware footprint and no full- time operations staff. The upshot of this is keeping expenses down. The downside, however, is that during heavy spikes of activity and off-hour periods, the site can occasionally slow down or seem less reliable. Under this new partnership, Newsvine will move to the geographically redundant, world-class data centers that house msnbc.com. Bigger, faster machines and more of them. 24/7 monitoring. There may not be a news site in the world which scales better than msnbc.com, and we look forward to benefiting from their excellent infrastructure.
4. A slightly bigger staff, able to evolve the site and provide features and support to the community without cutting any corners. Thus far, each Newsvine employee has had to wear a great variety of hats, and in some instances we have been strung very thin. The ability to add staff members in needed areas is crucial to our success as a business, as a web site and as a community. We look forward to providing excellent support and service to our users as our community grows dramatically during the forthcoming months and years. The team that set out to create the vision from day one will be freed up to continue developing the features and tools that make the magic of Newsvine possible. We will be armed with the resources and access to bring the best content produced by Newsviners to the world at large - bridging the gap between citizen and journalist.
5. More news and images from more sources. Newsvine's mainstream news and images have always come directly from the Associated Press, and in fact, being the quickest wire-to-web news site in the world has always been something we've taken a lot of pride in. However, with the welcoming of msnbc.com into the fold, we now have the potential to bring you more of the best reporting in the world and some of the most stunning news imagery you'll ever see online.

What is MSNBC getting, other than a slick and feature-packed website? Newsvine is also a thriving Citizen Journalism community, with solid stats. In our July review of Newsvine, we noted that Newsvine gets about 1.2 million unique visitors per month and it has grown at an average rate of 46% per quarter. Newsvine community members view an average of 21 pages per day and spend an average of 143 minutes per month on the site. The site gets about 80,000 comments a month and 250,000 votes a month.

Ms. Morgan will switch from running the Web site for a prominent traditional media organization to running a news Web site that is just over two years old.

"Getting somebody like this to come to our site says a boatload about where the industry is going," said Kenneth Lerer, who has been acting as the chief executive of The Huffington Post and will move up to chairman. He founded the site along with Arianna Huffington, the political commentator.

Ms. Morgan, who is 38 and has an M.B.A. from Harvard, worked in business development at CBS before taking the top post at CBSNews.com in 2005. She said she saw her new role as a business position and not as a journalism position, and added, "It was an opportunity too good to pass up."

"Huffington Post has a lot of smart editors working for it," she said. What the site does well, Ms. Morgan said, is "take a news story and build a community of debate around it."

"Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur.

"The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."

The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper.

Most U.S. news Web sites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is The Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based Web site.

TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors.

Google is playing host to articles from four news agencies, including The Associated Press, the company said Friday, setting the stage for it to generate advertising revenue from Google News.

The news agencies - the Press Association of Britain, Canadian Press, Agence France-Presse and The A.P. - now have their articles featured with the organizations’ own brands on Google News. The companies have agreed to license news feeds to Google.

The five-year-old Google News service previously searched the Web to uncover links to news articles from thousands of sources, and clustered links on similar subjects together.

Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies' articles.

Because of Google's campaign to simultaneously reduce duplicate articles, the original wire service article is likely to be featured in Google News instead of versions of the same article from newspaper customers, sapping ad revenue to those newspapers.

Mr. Nakagawa's simple Web site has become the center of the "LOLcats" phenomenon, a booming online subculture built around digital images and deliberately bad grammar. There's not much to it: Take a digital photo -- often one of household pets, particularly cats -- and purposefully place misspelled text on top. Anyone with elementary skills in Adobe's Photoshop or Microsoft's Paint software can make their own.

Nearly nine months after launching icanhascheezburger.com, Mr. Nakagawa's site receives around 200,000 unique visitors and a half-million page views each day, according to Mr. Nakagawa.

Visitors can browse a sprawling gallery of lolcats, vote for their favorites and post comments. Mr. Nakagawa says he receives up to 500 submissions a day, thanks in no small part to his site's tool that helps people build their own. He says every entry is screened for merit and originality before earning inclusion.

Only 12 or so submissions make the gallery a day. "It's ridiculous," Mr. Nakagawa admits, "but we do go through all of them." He certainly has the time. Revenue from ads on the site is "more than enough to pay my bills."

MyTimes, in other words, appears to provide much of the functionality that portals like Yahoo began offering circa 1996. If the Times had rolled the feature out in 1995, therefore, who knows where its online presence would be today--probably a good deal larger than the 14 million uniques it currently has. Unfortunately, MyTimes does not seem to offer much that a committed NYTimes.com browser could already find on the site, and its feature set as a start-page almost certainly falls short of those offered by Yahoo, Google, NetVibes, and the dozens of other "My" portals out there, at which most Internet users have already established a presence.

In a way, Zillow is attempting to combine its real estate data with the citizen journalism movement, encouraging people who live in select neighborhoods to upload photos, events, news and other information.

The idea is that people will not only visit Zillow to learn about homes, but -- one could imagine -- local restaurants, recent crimes or the history of the neighborhood. With this feature, you could also see Zillow moving down the path of trying to link people together in certain neighborhoods to share a lawnmower, sell a grill, host a fundraiser or, perhaps, find a date. And if that occurs, the real estate information and Zestimates offered by Zillow today might just be a Trojan horse into other lucrative advertising markets.

I'm not denying that the thought that one of those bombs could have gone off, bringing Baghdad-style carnage to the streets of British cities, was playing in the back of my mind as well. As I suggested earlier, were that to happen, a blog, updating every 20 minutes or so, rather than a conventionally crafted news story, could well be the best way to do justice to such a disaster.

Thank God we haven't had to blog on that sort of news event. But we have launched "Making News" in an understated, sotto voce sort of way. It is, in that deathly phrase, something of "a work in progress". And, already, we've drawn some conclusions from the first few posts and made some changes.

For one thing, users shouldn't have to click to "read more". They should be able to read as much of the post as possible from the blog's home page. So brevity and minimum use of pictures, unless they actually enhance the story or there is relevant video to be embedded in the page, will be the order of the day.

"Coverage of a recent incident involving a reporter having his media credential revoked at an NCAA championship requires clarification on both why this action was taken as well as current NCAA policy. The reporter's credential was revoked because he continued to blog live play-by-play reports from the press box after being repeatedly asked to stop. Any transmission of live play-by-play information by any entity other than a media rights holder is prohibited.

Following this incident, the NCAA issued incorrect information to credentialed media which stated that in-game updates of any type are prohibited. In fact, in-game updates to include score and time remaining in competition are permissible by any media entity whether credentialed or not.

We apologize for any confusion that may have resulted from the incorrect information."

"The Cards didn't get this kind of pitching in Missouri. If they can pitch like this and keep hitting like they do, whoa."

NCAA spokesman Bob Williams said Monday that Bennett was asked not to blog about game action before Sunday's game.

"In a nutshell, we asked the blogger repeatedly not to cover it in that manner, because it violates the policy, and he continued, and his credential was revoked," Williams said.

Williams said it didn't matter that the newspaper had blogged at other NCAA events, like the Orange Bowl and NCAA basketball tournament.

"Essentially, we enforce the policy when we learn of violations," Williams said. "So the fact that he may have blogged at a championship before really has no effect on the policy."

The newspaper said the university circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA's manager of broadcasting, before the first super regional game Friday. It said blogs are considered a "live representation of the game" and blogs containing action photos or game reports are prohibited until the game is over.

"It's a real question that we're being deprived of our right to report within the First Amendment from a public facility," Fleischaker said. "Once a player hits a home run, that's a fact. It's on TV. Everybody sees it. [The NCAA] can't copyright that fact."

Losing your job can be devastating. But we, your colleagues at The Chronicle, hope to make it a little less devastating.

The goal of this blog is to share information that will help your transition. For those who lost their job, you might want to provide your contact info so we can reach you (either by posting a comment or sending us an e-mail). This also could be the place for you to ask for help, be it on a personal or professional level.

For those still at The Chronicle, maybe there's something you want to offer, be it job leads, career resources, or simply a friendly voice.

For starters, we in multimedia want to offer you whatever help we can. If you plan to seek a job in journalism, chances are that you're going to be asked about your multimedia expertise. Whether you're a veteran multimedia journalist or someone who still isn't clear on what a podcast is, please feel free to contact us by email or cell. Think of us as your multimedia consultants (minus, of course, any fee).

The blog also warns angry current or ex-employees to leave their critical comments off the site, noting "...the tone of this blog...is to support one another. No doubt there are plenty of people who are angry about this situation -- we ask that you choose another venue to express those feelings. Thanks in advance."

Dead blogs litter the Internet like squashed bugs on a windscreen during a warm Southern evening. Since their christening in 1999, millions of people like Haddock have dabbled with blogs only to abandon them after a few months.

"I think a lot of people started blogs because they got excited; the hype was there, but they really didn't have a purpose," said futurist Jim Carroll, whose clients include the Walt Disney Corp., Nestle and the BBC. "There's only so much you can read about somebody else's life before you get bored with it," he said.

The blog rush has slowed down from 175,000 new blogs posted per day in July 2006 to 120,000 new blogs per day as of March, according to Technorati, a blog tracking company.

Blogs with staying power, Endgaget's techno-blog and Boing Boing's curios-blog, stick around because they have a direct purpose, Carroll says. That, plus paid staff and advertising dollars.

Beginning today, Prince columnists debate everything from dodgeball to the French presidential elections to the new basketball coach on the Prince's new blog, The Prox.

Barry Caro '09, Stephen Hsia '08, Soleine Leprince-Ringuet '09 and Jason Sheltzer '08 will post about anything and everything that takes their fancy as they make their ways around campus. If someone at Princeton is talking about it, we hope it'll be discussed on The Prox. We hope you'll share your thoughts as well and look forward to reading your comments.

Allow me to explain what I mean. I used to play air guitar with a band called Deep Purple. My playing was perfect, I had attitude and I even smashed my air guitar at the end of the number. The reason I played air guitar is that I couldn't play real guitar very well so I was forced to dwell in this fantasy world where my guitar playing meant something only to me. I should point out that this was years ago when I was still young and foolish. These days I play air tenor saxophone, which is far more challenging.

Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They're cobbled together by people who wouldn't stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It's rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.

It's even sadder when someone reads them.

Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me. Are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognised, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?

Topix is following the user-powered models of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project (ODP) of Web links in which volunteers are responsible for creating and editing entries. Topix will avoid the spam problem that sites like Digg have by requiring people to sign up with their real names, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive officer. Skrenta is co-founder of the ODP.

Anyone can submit local news by ZIP code through the Web site or from their cell phone. The citizen journalist idea came to executives after they unearthed hidden in the site's forums a posting from a Texas Minuteman of his first-person experience patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, something that wasn't published anywhere else, Skrenta said.

Yahoo Inc. will offer international news from reporters working with U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy Co., including a blog written by Iraqi staffers, the companies said on Wednesday.

The project will be called "Trusted Voices," and feature coverage from McClatchy foreign correspondents based in the Middle East, China and Latin America, among other regions.

Yahoo plans to launch the coverage on its news site early in the second quarter of 2007. The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

I hope you that you've noticed the changes taking place on my web site mrmagazine.com. With the addition of the blog and the regular updates of all the new launches you will be able to keep up with the latest happenings in the magazine world we love and enjoy. When in comes to new magazine launches, you will see every single title with its cover picture and frequency. The magazines will be posted only, and only if we have the actual physical copy of the first issue. If we miss your new magazine, please feel free to send it to us and we will make sure it will be added to the list. Remember, change is the only constant in our business.

Anna Wintour is as picky with words as she is with her wardrobe. According to one Vogue-er, "They are expanding the Vogue Web site and getting more involved with the Internet. But Anna hates the word 'blog' so much, she refuses to call anything on her site a blog and has charged her staff with coming up with a new word that isn't as garish-sounding. She wants it ASAP - in time for launch." However, a source close to Wintour said, "Anna just doesn't want people to refer to stories as blogs, because they're not. It's an improper use of the word." A rep said, "Anna has nothing against blogs."

Things have changed on the off-line front. I have to go now. It has been a lot of fun. I might be back sometime in the future, but I need to stop for awhile anyway.

TaTa For Now.

Usually, the VHB provides links, charts, stats and commentary (like about the number of properties on the Vancouver market and their average prices, historical patterns, comparisons between Vancouver and other cities) that have the implicit questions -- is this a bubble and will it crash?

His last post on Friday left no indication that a halt was in the works, so those who visited his blog on Monday morning expressed surprise. "This is very sudden and I am sad to hear that the mysterious VHB will no longer be making the prescient posts I have become used to reading over the past 12+ months," said a commenter named Mohican.

"Please!!! Don't go! She'll come round!! Just involve her more...She can do some graphs and you guys can research, together," said a commenter named Mighty Mouse.

"Well good luck with that. If you can, keep the site alive. It will be interesting to go back and check the comments in the future. We are going to look like either prescient geniuses or ignorant boobs. I don't think there is much in between," said a commenter named Freako.

Thanks to all who have posted such nice things over the past few weeks. Life is going very well, thank you. I do miss blogging in a way, but on the whole it is better to get on with the coolness that is life. Enjoy the crash! (Whenever it comes . . .) VHB out.

Is there a quirky landmark in your town? An unsung hero or an eccentric? Do you frequent a little-known locale that has a claim to fame — or deserves one? We want to know about them. MSNBC.com will be featuring notable locations across the U.S., submitted by you. Send us photos and videos of the best-kept secrets in your area.

Steve Spendlove realizes that after last month's layoffs of most of the news-gathering staff at tiny KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa there will be less local coverage. The Clear Channel executive overseeing the station knows there won't be reporters to investigate local scandals, let alone do those fluffy woman-turns-100 features that make TV anchors cock their heads and smile at the end of a newscast.

But Spendlove said that the station's "business model" hadn't been working for years, and that "covering one-eighth of the Bay Area" is neither a moneymaker nor even an operation large enough to be measured by Nielsen ratings.

So the next step in Channel 50's evolution will be a nationally watched experiment in local television coverage. Over the next few months, the station's management plans to ask people in the community -- its independent filmmakers, its college students and professors, its civic leaders and others -- to provide programming for the station.

Will they be paid? That's being worked out. Who will cover the harder-edged stories? Some will be culled from local newspaper and TV online sites, Spendlove said, and "other sources" that are still being discussed.

Sometimes, I feel a little lonely on my Oscar blog. The solution: I take a rhetorical baseball bat to a fan favorite, "Borat," and hundreds of rabid commentators appear. Hey, I've got readers.

Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at The Times have never been more in touch with readers' every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.

Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week's column, but maybe I'll write about, ah, blogging instead.

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism - letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?

Since the dawn of the Internet, one site has reigned over all others as the Web's official rounder-upper of the day's news: the Drudge Report. As anyone who works at a news website can tell you, the best driver of viewers to one of your stories is a link on Drudge. The second-best way is — there is no second-best way. For years, if a news story broke in the woods and Drudge didn't link to it, it didn't break.

Many, including such otherwise favored Web tycoons as Arianna Huffington and Gawker media's Nick Denton, have launched sites positioned as rivals to Drudge, but none has made a dent - until now. Welcome to Digg.com, the czar of social news - a kind of cross-pollination of Drudge and MySpace. The site's main function is fairly straightforward: Users post links on the Digg site to news stories. Other users look at the story and vote to either raise it up to the top of the site or bury it at the bottom.

Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.

Only 12% of the public read newspapers but 26% of the industry reads them.

32% of the public get their news from Tv but only 5% of the media does.

40% of the public gets their news form the internet but 60% of the media industry does.

Just over half the public said blogs are important but 86% of the media said they are.

He reckons on more and more blogs: "We'll reach a new principle in the democratic experience - one man, one blog."

The New York Times, the gray lady of establishment journalism, plans to begin posting user-generated video in March, an executive said Wednesday.

Speaking in a panel discussion at the SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York City, Times executive Nicholas Ascheim said that developing video content is costly.

"The most expensive thing is the journalists themselves. That's why user-generated content is interesting," said Mr. Ascheim, director of entertainment for video and audio at New York Times Digital.

"Welcome to DarynKagan.com," Kagan says in one of her daily videocasts. She's wearing a cream-colored sweater and sitting in front of a cozy fire. "Today, we are dipping into the love bucket."

After years spent presiding over the world's tragedies, Kagan now brings news from over the rainbow, tapping America's love for hero dogs and spunky grannies. On television, these tales are usually shoved to the end of the newscast, but on DarynKagan.com (tagline: "Show the world what's possible!"), it's all dogs-'n'-grannies, all the time.

Kagan brings us a mountain climber who's blind and a Wichita judge who's still hearing cases at age 99. ("You go, Judge Brown!" Kagan says. No word from the defendants.) She goes running with a man who has no legs. She brings in her kitty as a special guest star. She visits with a guy she calls the "love editor" who just happens to have his own Web site, where he sells men on the idea that they should pay him to figure out how they'll propose to their girlfriends.

Kagan won't talk about her old flame, Rush Limbaugh, from whom she parted ways last year. "I don't discuss Rush," she says. But she is eager to share the "freaky amount" of good things that have happened to her since she started her Web site.

I get that you have opinions you want to share. That's great. You're the Person of the Year. I just don't have any interest in them. First of all, I did a tiny bit of research for my column, so I'm already familiar with your brilliant argument. Second, I've already written my column, so I can't even steal your ideas and get paid for them.

There is no practical reason to send your rants to me. If you want to counter my opinion publicly, write a letter to the editor. If you want me fired, write a letter to the publisher. If you want a note back, write a letter in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. Or you could just write mean things about my column on some blog. Don't worry, I'll see them. I have a "Joel Stein" RSS feed that goes straight into my arteries.

But don't make me feel like you expect a return e-mail. Because this takes my assistant four to five hours every week. I know this because my assistant is me.

That address on the bottom of this column? That is the pathetic, confused death knell of the once-proud newspaper industry, and I want nothing to do with it. Sending an e-mail to that address is about as useful as sending your study group report about Iraq to the president.

Of course, the crucial point here is not what he wants to do, it what his readers want him to do. If they're happy just reading him and not maintaining any sort of dialogue, Stein, and journalists like him, will still have a job in five years. if the audience decides that dialogue is something they want, he's in trouble.

Traditionally, the way that writers get feedback on their books is through sales. If sales start slipping, it means his readership is slipping. Actors have the same process: if people decide they hate Tom Hanks' last performance (or him) they just don't go to his movies (Note: this is not a problem Hanks is having, by the way. He was voted as one of American's most likeable movie stars).

But you know what? It took a column like this to get Jeff Hess and many of the rest of us to read Joel Stein. He got our attention. I enjoyed the article, because while there's plenty of good conversation in blogs, there's also lots of empty and pious bleating about conversations. The conversation has grown at super speed into an article of faith, an orthodoxy. It's good to have someone give it a good kick--even if he's not going to benefit from or respond to our insightful, passionate and provocative responses.

Two enterprising and ambitious journalists with the Fife Herald - Adam Morris and Paul Breslin - have launched a MySpace page linked to their paper (circ. 13,590), which is based in the town of Cupar. In just a couple of weeks the site has recruited 400 friends and it is being used, says Morris, "as a tool to get younger folk to give us story tip offs." Two examples: a local lad took a Ł100 car to Italy and back; revelations of raves in "a secret bunker".

As Morris rightly notes: "It's a totally untapped market for local papers, and it opens up new lines of communication."

The Ag is the work of Time's Matthew Yeomans, an early-rising journalist based in Cardiff, Wales. Yeomans scours his bookmarks and RSS feeds every weekday morning and writes a digested version of the best stories from hundreds of the world's great newspapers and blogs, giving you all the news you need to read without reading all the news.

This opportunity comes with a challenge. This year, aside from the usual self-deluded promises to eat better and exercise more, my New Year's resolution includes a pledge to be more in touch, especially with the elusive 18-34 age group.

I have no illusions that members of this coveted demographic will suddenly take to a guy as old as their fathers. But I want to understand them.

So I'm asking for their help in building a blog. The technical staff at The Post will handle the nuts and bolts. What I'm looking for are ways to encourage participation from people who aren't already regular correspondents. I am especially interested in Internet links that will let people go from my blog to other blogs or to websites that may decide to link back.

Now, I need some other ideas. I'm thinking the usual political suspects - ColoradoPols.com, ToTheRight.org, Colorado Confidential, the Drudge Report, that sort of thing. But I'm looking for some range here, say a link to Dan Savage, whose Savage Love sex column entertains my 20-something colleague Chris Frates.

The blog can only be so blue. But I wouldn't mind hearing from folks who are over-pierced and under 30 about what's on their minds. My hope for the blog is to expose myself - in a strictly intellectual sense, of course - to new ideas.

***

More than anything, though, I need participation and ideas outside the collection of usual suspects battling over Iraq, immigration, gun control and abortion. Those things will, of course, be fair game on the blog. But people certainly have lives outside of ideological flashpoints.

I've been scooped before, but not like this. I call Robert Scoble to interview him for a column I'm writing on blogging and I end up being the story - a story that's posted before I'm even back from lunch.

Seriously, Scoble who rose to fame as a Microsoft blogger and now works on video podcasting at PodTech.net, is a nice guy who was gentle in his criticism and constructive in his advice. And he asked if could write about me on his Scobleizer blog.

(Hey, I call to him to say I'm attention starved and he asks if he can write about me. Of course, I said yes.)

Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States, according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.

"There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images," said Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group. He said the agency had always bought newsworthy pictures from individuals and part-time contributors known as stringers.

"This is looking out and saying, 'What if everybody in the world were my stringers?'" Mr. Ahearn said.

The project is among the most ambitious efforts in what has become known as citizen journalism, attempts by bloggers, start-up local news sites and by global news organizations like CNN and the BBC to see if readers can also become reporters.

Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events. For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo.

The site already offers a mix of opinion and breaking news from wire services and other sources, but Ms. Huffington said she wanted to produce reported pieces that were expressed with individual voices.

"That's the combination you need online," she said, adding that unlike bloggers, who generally file when they want to, her reporters will have deadlines and regular schedules and will travel for their articles. Also unlike bloggers, Ms. Huffington said, they will be paid.

Ms. Henneberger, 48, who lives in Washington and had been a reporter for The New York Times as well as Newsweek, where she is a contributing editor, has been writing a book for the last two years about women voters.

She said she was joining The Huffington Post not because of frustration with print media but because "it's such a great opportunity to build my own team."

Why the name MetaMedia? The "meta" is meant to reflect media that are changing, folding in on themselves and self-reflective — after all, we are media commenting on media. "Meta" echoes the convergence of media and technology, constantly evolving and continually engaging. If you look on Dictionary.com, you will find many different - if not contradictory! - definitions: change, transformation, beyond, transcending, more comprehensive, at a higher state of development, self-referential… (See more from the IHT on the tech/media convergence here, under In-Depth Coverage.) And heck, we just thought it sounded cool.

The purpose of the new category is to encourage and honor exemplary local journalism, marked by strong reporting across a spectrum of potential subjects. "The Pulitzer Prizes have long valued such reporting," Gissler said, "but this makes our interest much more explicit."

While the local category replaces the Beat Reporting category that was created in 1991, the work of beat reporters remains eligible for entry in a wide range of categories that include-depending on the specialty involved-national, investigative, and explanatory reporting, as well as the new local category.

With its new rules for online submissions, the Pulitzer Board will require each online element to be a single, discretely designated presentation, such as a database, blog, interactive graphic, slide show, or video presentation. Each designated element will count as one item in the total number of items, print or online, that are permitted in an entry.

Q. What is an online element?
A. It is a single, unified, discretely designated presentation. For example, it can be an online story, database, blog, interactive graphic, slide show or video presentation. Each designated element will count as one item in the total number permitted in an entry.

Q. How much online content can a single element contain?
A. There is no absolute limit. However, the burden on a jury should be kept in mind. An online element with multiple parts, such as a blog with manifold postings, should be a cohesive presentation. The conceptual logic tying the parts together should be clear.

The only problem we forsee with Star's desire for blogmash is statements like the one above, in which Fuller said Star wouldn't "out" a celebrity unless "they chose to go public or chose to be very public about what they were doing." That's no good — blogs don't have morals. In fact, some of them are just horrific.

We are launching with 16 blogs (see below for the full list). Each one ties into business in some way, as well as reflects each individual blogger's interests and obsessions. (The B2 bloggers will cover topics ranging from venture capital, the media industry, and real estate to green startups and design—but also touch upon subjects such as surfing, sailing, and extreme gadgetry). If you want to get a sense of what our mini-network is blogging about, just go to B2 Beta. There, we will feature the best posts as our editors' picks, and we will also republish every single post from across the network in what we call the Spew. You can subscribe to B2 Beta (both the editor's picks and the Spew) via an RSS feed or e-mail. Or, if you prefer, you can get just the the unfiltered Spew. All the ads will be served by CNNMoney.com (where our official Website is also located), and our blogger journalists will get a modest bonus tied to the popularity of each of their blogs. (Yes, we believe blogging is hard work and that bloggers should get paid for that work). Please check out B2 Beta and tell us what you think.

Kate began working as a copy editor at the Daily Record in July, after graduating from Lehigh University. She's been living in her uncle's apartment since then -- and is being booted out Dec. 1, when the lease is up. So the 22-year-old is on a quest to find an affordable apartment -- her first apartment -- in the Morris County area.

They are interesting people. They think that they have something to say. They want to be read and heard and seen. But their aspiration is blocked by the obnoxious monster called the Editor and their high-voltage facts mixed with slam-dunk fiction, with a lot of typos and commas and semi-colons in wrong places, go down a drain called the Editorial Process. So they turn to blogging and take refuge under a series of posts on a web page in the form of a diary, with hypertext links to other such diaries. The bloggers love to attack those they hate: from McDonald's to Starbucks to Karl Marx to Mandal to Germaine Greer to the colleague at the next work station. Blogs are an online stream of consciousness written by people who believe that they are under orders from someone to change the world.

Good idea. But the pace at which the blogosphere is getting cramped with half-wits, religious maniacs, failed writers, sociopaths and cold-blooded killers, is scary. They all scream so loudly that those talking sense have to drop their decibel levels. Every 10 minutes, some three million new bloggers invade the WWW with a vengeance. It looks like revenge of the amateur who dreams of becoming a reporter. And that's a cause for concern. The editorial content - uncontrolled and unregulated - has made it free for all: In the UK, PayPerPost and Bloggers Republic offer such opinions that would invite legal suits in a newspaper; the US marines are using myspace.com for giving a positive spin to their stories from Iraq, and in Canada, an "angel of death" wrote a blog before shooting at 20 people. Forget wrong grammar and bad spellings, bloggers are now writing murders on the web.

Yep, this is my new gig. No more Microsoft-Watch for this Microsoft watcher. I decided it was time to move to a place that reflects my opinion that blogging is the future of journalism. If you want to read more about my decision to join the blogging ranks at ZDNet, check out my short but sweet "Exit Interview" over on Robert McLaws' LonghornBlogs.com Web site.

On this new site, I will weigh in on Microsoft news of interest to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Expect to read about everything from Windows Vista and Office 2007, to Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft "Live."

Speaking of blogs, although quips about celebrity faux pas during New York Fashion Week make great fodder for gossip columns, Robin Givhan, The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic, doesn't have room for such tidbits in articles for the paper. But her blog, which she began during the fall shows in February and continued through last week's spring shows, provided a home for such details. Givhan chronicled action in the front row, at parties and behind the runway in a conversational blog at washingtonpost.com. For example, she described how Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour seemed taken with tennis ace Roger Federer at the Marc Jacobs show. "She seemed to be rather in awe of him. Did we see her flick her hair with a girlish toss?" she wrote.

In print, such musings "usually ended up on the cutting-room floor," said Givhan. "The blog is much more about the scene and the celebrities and cocktail parties, which ordinarily did not make it into my stories unless it was in passing or directly related to the theme of the story."

A footnote: out of curiosity, I did a little "Googling" for the word "blog." And one of the first entries that popped up was a guy by the name of Henry Blogg. He lived long before the age of the internet. But his story is quite remarkable. He was apparently an accomplished sailor - a legendary lifeboatman, to be exact - who weathered fierce storms while doing his job, rowing out to sea. It took guts - and some muscle - to venture out into the unknown like that.

Reading his story reminded me of some wisdom that was passed on to me when I was deciding whether or not I should come to CBS. I was anxious about making a career change. But a good friend told me: "Katie, a boat is always safe in the harbor. But it's not what it was built for."

She was absolutely right.

And here I am.

Like Henry Blogg, this blog is shoving off from the harbor, and heading out to a mysterious and uncharted sea. The harbor was great. But, let's face it: we're supposed to be exploring the wider world. This is what we were built for. And that's what we'll be doing at "Couric & Co."

After an investigation, The New Republic has determined that the comments in our Talkback section defending Lee Siegel's articles and blog under the username "sprezzatura" were produced with Siegel's participation. We deeply regret misleading our readers. Lee Siegel's blog will no longer be published by TNR, and he has been suspended from writing for the magazine.

Asked which sources are accurate, true and unbiased, 66% named national TV.

National newspapers were chosen by 63%. The same percentage rated regional and local newspapers.

Radio was believed to be less accurate, chosen by just 55% of those surveyed.

Only 36% of respondents rated websites and just 24% rated blogs.

IWM: The Observer is facing competition from blogs like Gawker and Jossip, which have a similar witty, irreverent style -- but are updated several times a day. How do you fight the blogs?

Kushner: Loyal Internet readers have the capacity to read as many sites as they deem necessary. There is much less constraint in this field, whereas in print, people are more likely to subscribe to just one newspaper.

I have great respect for what blogs such as Jossip and Gawker have accomplished in such a short time. I think they understand their clientele better than most in the media business.

I intend to make our Web site edgier and add additional daily content to expand our readership and provide a broader ranging product with something for everyone.

Score one for Little Green Footballs.

The conservative blog cried foul after Reuters moved a photograph Saturday showing the aftermath of an Israeli bombing run in suburban Beirut. The two symmetrical plumes of black smoke smelled fake to LGF's Charles Johnson.

He looked again and saw buildings that appeared to have been cut and pasted. Johnson posts a series of close-ups and animations to make his point.

"It's so incredibly obvious...," he wrote. "Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There really is no question about it."

On Monday, it added further charges, saying he had manipulated at least one other photo -- and that all of his more than 900 pictures had been deleted from the news agency's data base.

Reuters also said today it had put in place a tighter editing procedure for images of the Middle East conflict to ensure that no photograph from the region would be transmitted to subscribers without review by the most senior editor on the Reuters Global Pictures Desk, according to a Reuters spokeswoman.

“There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," said Tom Szlukovenyi, Reuters Global Picture Editor, in a statement. "Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy."

He added that the fact that Hajj had altered two of his photographs meant none of his work for Reuters could be trusted either by the news service or its users.

Online media outlets like Slate or Salon prominently feature their links to other sites and some, particularly blogs, are built around the strength of their links. But newspapers have been reluctant to direct readers outside their own gates. These deals with Inform are but one indication that newspapers may be reconsidering long-held beliefs about how to compete, and cooperate, with other publishers.

"Five years ago, everybody said you have to keep readers on your site, with no links out to other sites," said Caroline H. Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online division of the Washington Post Company. "But ultimately, people will go where they want to go."

"To the extent we can provide them more Washington Post video or more information from around the Web, we're all for it," Ms. Little added. "And we get the benefit of that, too, because we get a lot of referrals from the Web, also."

There are instances where the Post's Web site already links to stories from these competitors. For instance, in the online version of his "White House Briefing" column last week, Dan Froomkin included a link to a New York Times story from the previous week. According to Jim Brady, the executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, reporters or Web producers can insert links to another paper’s site when they see fit.

"We think it's the right thing to do," Mr. Brady said. "It seems limiting to tell people about something another news organization has reported and not point them to it. It goes against the Web's DNA."

"I wanna see the body," wrote a commenter at Metafilter.com. Another simply wrote, "$."

Indeed, alongside a broad mixture of lampoon and good riddance - perhaps to be expected - was a wide lack of credulity at the idea that the man had died at all. "Word on the street is that he's actually chillin' in the Dominican Republic, fanning himself with his offshore money he squirreled away and sharing a pitcher of sangria with Tupac," wrote NemesisBecoming, a New York City blogger, on Thursday. "It's too [expletive] convenient, people."

From one corner of the Web to another (and with varying degrees of tongue in cheek), Mr. Lay was imagined skulking about the shadows (or getting the party started at one island resort or another), with nearly every fugitive or famous person whose death remains, at least for some people, a matter of debate - from the rapper Tupac Shakur and the comedian Andy Kaufman to the mobster Whitey Bulger.

The syndicator of Ann Coulter's newspaper column is looking into allegations that the right-wing pundit has lifted material from other sources.

"We are reviewing the material and expect to have a response some time next week," Kathie Kerr, a spokeswoman for Universal Press Syndicate, told The Associated Press on Friday.

The New York Post and the Web sites Raw Story and the Rude Pundit have raised numerous questions about Coulter's columns, which appear in more than 100 newspapers, and her best-selling "Godless," already notorious for the author's calling four 9/11 widows, who supported Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004, "harpies" thriving on their husbands' demise.

WHO BLINKED? That was "Blink" author Malcolm Gladwell, the highly paid lecturer at business conferences everywhere, defending the viability of old media in a gabfest the other night at the New York Public Library to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the online magazine Slate. While former Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine and Slate founder Michael Kinsley predicted doom and gloom for newspapers in the Internet age, Gladwell sang the praises of paper products and derided bloggers as "parasites" who feed on newspapers to survive. If newspapers die, "What are they [the bloggers] going to do? Get jobs?" Gladwell mocked. Let's hope he's right.

Blogs can be many things -- trouble-making, independent, cool, nerdy, peppered with annoying links, even full of kittens who look like Hitler. They can also be abused for attention-seeking headlines (eg "Down with Blogs"). But one thing they have in common is that they work best when they go both ways -- when they are a true exchange.

That's why the editors across BBC News have got together to start their own blog. Called "The Editors", it launches on Monday. The hope is that it will become a discussion forum for all sorts of issues and dilemmas surrounding our news programmes.

Each day, The Editors will include a round-up of where the BBC has been in the news, what members of the audience have told us in the previous 24 hours, our responses to that feedback, and the resulting discussion.

It's not an easy process, but there's a lot to gain -- because of the unique way the BBC is funded, we want to be the most open and accountable news organisation in the world.