ReadWriteWeb

Journalism has always been about reporting facts and assertions and making sense of world affairs. No news there. But as we move further into the 21st century, we will have to increasingly rely on "data" to feed our stories, to the point that "data-driven reporting" becomes second nature to journalists.

The shift from facts to data is subtle and makes perfect sense. You could that say data are facts, with the difference that they can be computed, analyzed, and made use of in a more abstract way, especially by a computer.

We love it when members of the ReadWriteWeb community share links with us to things we might like to write about. In order to make that easier to do, thus hopefully something you'll do more of, we're posting a bookmarklet you can drag up to your browser toolbar and click anytime you're on a page you want to share with the ReadWriteWeb staff.

Tip RWW <-- Just grab that link and give it a click any time you're on a page you want to share with us. An email window will open (just using a mailto: link) pre-populated with the link and page title, addressed to us. Hit send, maybe add a note if you like. Breaking news, good background information, critiques of the things we've written - whatever you like. We'll give you credit for anything we use in a post, unless you ask us not to. Consider yourself part of the RWW team.

Some users are being shown links to Wikipedia articles about current events clustered in the lists of sources on Google News, Google confirmed today. Those collaboratively written and edited pages will now sit side by side with professional news reporting.

Is this another sign that a fact-based understanding of the world is being eclipsed by an amalgamation of aggregated collaborative thinking? Or is it the ascent of the best the internet has to offer - crowdsourced news gathering and fact checking as an essential part of the story? We argue it's the later, but it's easy to imagine many people seeing Wikipedia on a news page and feeling pretty cynical about it.

These days, everywhere you look it seems that some newspaper is closing its doors, stopping its presses, or maybe just going online-only. This sea of change is being heralded by some as the "death of journalism," a transformation that has been brought about thanks to the web. But is the web really killing journalism? Or, is it allowing an entirely new type of journalism to emerge?

San Francisco-based blogging startup Six Apart has announced they will be giving away free accounts on their TypePad blogging system for professional bloggers and journalists who recently lost their jobs as well as those who fear the axe is coming. Cleverly dubbed the "Journalist Bailout Program," the service includes one free blog, a place in the Six Apart Media advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com, a as well as other tools and advice on driving traffic to your site, all courtesy of Six Apart.