It’s good to see journalism school books and primers finally being updated to reflect the new challenges and opportunities of our age.

A good example of this is a book which arrived in my mail box just before Christmas:

Now, it must be said that it arrived in my mail box because I provided some input on the chapter on social media a few years back,  and one of its editors is a former editor of mine.

Still, the book has gone through many revisions since I read that one chapter on social media, and the result looks very promising. I’ve yet to find time to actually read the book, but skimming through some of the content on social media and new digital tools it looks like it offers a very comprehensive and up-to-date guide.  

I’m especially looking forward to reading Rune Ytreberg’s chapter on the new digital tools of the trade properly. Ytreberg is also due to give a talk on this for The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA), the organisation I co-founded, used to run and am a still a board member of, towards the end of this month.

From skimming through it I see that one of the plethora of sources he credits is Journalism.co.uk’s Colin Meek who NONA brought over from Scotland to Oslo talk about advanced online research techniques in April 2010.

Incidentally that was the previously mentioned, and much covered, trip where Meek almost got stranded in Oslo due to the ash cloud crisis. Only VG’s brilliant editorial innovation, the Hitchhiker’s central, and me convincing a friend to drive stranded travellers, including Meek, from Oslo to Dover (and then back again with another load of stranded travellers) prevented that.

In either case, it’s great to see some of NONA’s work bear fruit in this way as in the book, and hopefully inspiring both better teaching and better practice when it comes to utilising today’s digital tools as efficiently as possible to create good, and perhaps even innovative, investigative journalism both in terms of uncovering worthwhile stories and connections, and finding new ways to convey these stories.