ReadWriteWeb

Sometimes we have bad days. It's a part of being human, part of working in a stressful time and place. Among the problems of being a blogger are that it exposes one's weaknesses, magnifies the limits of one's personal perspective, and often amplifies our feelings beyond what we might have intended. I have avoided being a blogger in the traditional sense partly because I'm fairly certain that you don't care - nor should you - about these things as they pertain to me.

Andy Rooney was among the greatest news writers of his generation. But during the latter stages of his life, he complained about how awful life had become, about how things had ceased to be familiar any more, about how disruption had left his world a blur. Rooney's complaints had become emblematic of what has been perceived as the decline of the role of television as an information medium. So when M.G. Siegler spends a few minutes with us in the same vein, complaining about how the object of his career up until recently has been "bulls---," one wonders whether this should be emblematic of the end of something else.

A startup is hoping to combine two hot web trends, crowd sourcing and microearning, into a single savior for cash-strapped, broadcast newsrooms.

Rawporter, an iPhone app that will soon be rolled out for Android, turns almost anyone into a local news cameraman or camerawoman. Instead of dispatching a camera crew to a fire during rush hour and risk they won't get there until after the flame is out, a television news reporter can create an assignment from Rawporter's Web interface and send it to anyone with the app who may be in the area of the fire.

My main man Steve Myers over at Poynter has broken down the outcome of a brand new phenomenon in the coverage of elections. Google's U.S. elections portal, launched just ahead of the Iowa Caucuses on January 3, provided more useful data about the caucus results than the Associated Press did. According to the veterans with whom Myers spoke, it was quite an upset. The speed and portability, not to mention the $0.00 price tag, of Google's data made an impression on the news outlets covering the caucus.

Myers points to WNYC's coverage as a superb example of the advantages gained by incorporating Google tools into original coverage. There's no question that Google has built a useful platform for news organizations on top of its existing core services. Myers wonders whether Google could even compete directly with the AP for the lucrative business of reporting election returns, and his sources believe it could, if its leaders wanted to. But I think there's even more going on with these Google election initiatives. It looks to me like Google is searching for ways to disrupt the whole election news business.

MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC have dedicated no time to covering the Stop Online Piracy Act in their evening newscasts since Oct. 1, according to a report by Ben Dimiero of Media Matters For America.

CNN, meanwhile, has dedicated a single evening news segment to the issue. All of the companies covered in the report have either publicly supported SOPA or have parent companies that have done so.

Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool - it's an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also be used to power a news website. That's exactly what ShortFormBlog does.

Launched in January 2009 by Ernie Smith from Washington D.C., the site publishes about 30 news soundbites a day. ShortFormBlog is still a part-time project for Smith, who also works as a graphic designer at The Washington Post. He's hoping to turn the site into a full-time business. And I think he's onto something, certainly in terms of using a tool like Tumblr to change the way news is delivered and consumed. I interviewed Smith to find out more about his Tumblr-powered news service.

Google and the Associated Press have joined forces to offer a scholarship program for student journalists administered by the Online News Association. The AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program will offer six undergraduate or graduate students $20,000 scholarships for the 2012-13 school year.

From the press release:

"The program is targeted to individual students creating innovative projects that further the ideals of digital journalism. A key goal is to promote geographic, gender and ethnic diversity, with an emphasis on rural and urban areas."

Applications are now open. Only U.S. citizens are eligible (see eligibility requirements). The deadline is January 27, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

In a savvy sashay of marketing brilliance, Twitter was able to attract more journalists' eyeballs to its platform than anything short of an overwhelming disaster could garner. And it was able to do so in a matter of minutes with absolutely no news at all.

While much of tech media trumpeted the introduction of Twitter for Newsrooms (#TfN) as if the guidelines for journalists presented some new technology or service, Twitter and its partners made off like bandits with the sustained and focused attention of the most influential group of people on the planet: journalists and bloggers.

The fundamental methods journalists use to find stories and engage with sources is changing. On the cusp of the media revolution is National Public Radio senior strategist Andy Carvin and his use of social media and crowd sourcing to tell the story of turmoil in the Middle East ... from 5000 miles away.

Carvin used Twitter to build a network that now keeps him on top of the news that comes out of the Middle East and in doing so has shown the media industry a new way to be a reporter. The question becomes: is the future of the news industry tied to the technology or is technology an enabler to creating human networks that spread information?

To predict the future, you must have the past. That is the theory Nieman Journalism Labs has built upon in creating a new encyclopedia of about the future of news called Encyclo.

Encyclo is a curated collection of noteworthy news organizations and what each has done for the future of news. Encyclo "takes a step back from the daily updates and focuses on background and context." What has ReadWriteWeb been doing to enhance the future of news? Encyclo has the answer.

Journalism museum, the Newseum, and Google have joined forces to launch the Journalists Memorial channel, described as "A Tribute to Journalists Who Have Died Pursuing the Truth."

For those of us who write about feature creep on beer apps from our bathtubs, journalism holds only the dual dangers of trolls and sponge-based injuries. For those who are out in the field, especially in dicey places, it holds the dangers of imprisonment, beatings and death. With the flare up of wars and now mass protests, 2011 has already seen 16 fatalities.