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Today citizen journalism site AllVoices is launching news bureaus in 30 additional countries. They say the bureaus are to be staffed by a hybrid force of professional and citizen journalists.

New countries represented include Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Egypt, India, the Philippines and Armenia.

Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment.

But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources?

A popular trend among startups these days is to create a video pitch. Cameras are cheaper, and do-it-yourself applications like iMovie on the Mac make video editing fun and easy. But like any form of new media, video is not just a secondary platform on which to present a carbon copy of something from an earlier medium; in other words, a video pitch needs to take advantage of the fact that it's a video. Videos have motion and interactivity and the ability to show anything with pictures and animation, which is much more than we can say simply with text.

Two companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.com and Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Answers.com has nearly 38 million pages of content on the Web so far; Demand Media produces 2,000 4,000 new pieces of content a day.

Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web? Will it lead to the same uniformity and lowest common denominator content that afflicts the television industry?

Two of Richmond's leading bloggers, Jeff Kelley and Ian Graham, sat down at a recent Social Media Club event to talk about journalism, politics, satire, and how new media is changing the game.

From parody sites being taken too seriously to fake news items somehow ending up on major news websites, the two tackle a wide spectrum of new media and industrial media issues. They also get to chat about the legitimacy and credentials of new media journalists and how many social media users have ended up being the first to report or broadcast important news in recent months.

Tonight, a small town's local media types got together and had a frank discussion about how real-world journalists are incorporating social media in the newsroom.

The conversation wasn't high tech, but it was stone-cold realistic. Here are a few videos from that panel; you'll hear on-air NBC affiliate reporters talk about how they've incorporated Twitter and Facebook to engage audiences and get leads on new stories, and you'll hear local bloggers talk about how they fit into the scheme of things.

GateHouse Media Inc. and The New York Times Co. will be facing each other in federal court this week in a fascinating case that is sure to be followed closely by bloggers and journalists across the nation.

GateHouse, one of the largest publishers of community newspapers in the United States, filed a copyright infringement suit last month claiming that the Globes' new local Web sites are using material without permission. The New York Times Co. is the parent company of The Boston Globe.

New York-based Peachtree Media Advisors has just released its annual report summarizing mergers, acquisitions and amounts of capital raised in the online media market last year. The report is available as a PDF download (2MB). In 2008 there were were 707 merger, acquisition and capital raise transactions in the online sector of media - which was 92 more transactions than 2007. The breakdown was 348 capital raise transactions and 359 acquisitions. Despite the increase in transactions however, the actual dollar value declined from 2007.

Tests on Twitter, wiki-style study groups, students quizzed on yesterday's most popular YouTube videos and the biggest hits on Del.icio.us/Popular - is this what the future of education is going to look like?

In some journalism schools around the US, it just might be. Would that really be so bad? Though many may disagree with us, we think there is some merit to teaching new media in journalism and other schools.