A roundup of recent social media and online journalism news and items of note:
✓ Facebook recently launched a “Media” page that includes a lot of how-to information specifically for journalists. It’s a handy resource that gives a broad overview of how reporters and others can use their Facebook profiles to promote their content.
✓ One of the latest hyperlocal news websites to launch, TBD.com in Washington, D.C., is getting a lot of attention in part because it has made social media and community central to its design and its overall philosophy. A co-founder of WashingtonPost.com, who’s now working with TBD, lists a few more reasons here that this new player in the online news industry stands out.
✓ 
A Red Cross poll suggests that about 16 percent of the public has used social media to find out information about an emergency.
The poll also suggests social media users are much more likely to use Facebook than Twitter to post “eyewitness information on an emergency or newsworthy event.”
✓ Mashable wrote a recent overview of how online news consumption is shifting “from consuming news through traditional media and news websites to having the news broadcast to us by our social network of friends.”
✓ Thought-provoking: A Norwegian newspaper doubled its online ad revenue by allocating half its staff resources to the Web.
✓ Catching up: This is a bit older, but worth reading. An article in The Atlantic reviews some of the experiments that Google (yes, Google) is testing to try to, as they say, “save journalism.” The article is long, but fascinating, and may even leave you very optimistic about the future of news.
✓ Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin-American Statesman, recently wrote something I thought was pretty well said and worth passing on:
“More than a few times in the past, I’ve read (and have been told) that social media will replace traditional journalism. That’s somewhat absurd. Social media is a tool, no different than the telephone or a computer. The good content still has to come from somewhere.”
I agree with the last point. The traditional means of distributing news may be dying, but there will never be a lack of demand for good content. Good post.