As you may know, the Costa Concordia, an Italian cruise ship, capsized on Friday off Isola del Giglio. Since then, the incident has been blowing up social media, with people sharing photos, videos, and of course their thoughts. On Google+, …

Last month, reports came out that YouTube had a "top secret news experiment" in the works, which would involve citizen journalism and "going local in San Francisco." This was played down as simply a version of YouTube Direct.

YouTube’s CitizenTube, the citizen reporting site that will power YouTube’s news feed, has posted some videos of riot footage from after the Lakers won the NBA championship. 

Footage includes fire and explosions. Insanity:

YouTube announced today that it is testing a new feature called the YouTube News Feed, which it is working on with the University of California at Berkley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The feature would track news as it breaks on YouTube.

CNN is reportedly suing a man who claims to be one of its iReporters. If you’re unfamiliar with iReport, it’s CNN’s citizen journalism site. This is a destination where regular people can submit news stories, and if CNN deems them worthy, they may pick them up for mainstream coverage. One such person has been going around giving himself titles like iReporter for CNN, and the news organization evidently doesn’t like that.

Google News is now labeling certain publications as blogs in search results. I’m not sure exactly how long it has been like this, but I noticed it for the first time today. In the past they have separated "news" and "blogs" on some results pages, but in what I’m talking about now, the results are mixed together, but some publications have "(blog)" written beside their names.

You can see a few examples here:

Over the weekend, YouTube made a couple news-oriented announcements. It would appear that the site is looking to become more of a resource for news content than ever before, and that means news from established publishers as well as amateurs.

Publishers Invited to Become YouTube Partners

MySpace users who have an interest in citizen journalism have just been given an opportunity to get involved.  MySpace and Fox News teamed up this afternoon to launch an official uReport community page.

Al Gore charges a lot of money to talk, and likely that was the reason for banning the press from a forthcoming keynote at the CTIA Wireless 2009 tradeshow in Vegas; can’t let those juicy words leak out to the general public for nothing.

AT&T is facing backlash from supporters of PEG (public, educational, and government) channels around the country because of how the company has bundled them on its AT&T U-Verse IPTV service. But in a world that includes YouTube, is it time to cut cable (and fiber) carriers some slack on this issue?

I’ve seen at least two stories today that remind us why social media can be a legitimate venue for good information. If you haven’t been able to grasp the concept yet, perhaps this will help.

When will we get tired of pointing out what a great tool Twitter is for breaking news? This is essentially the question asked in this CNET article.

The right side of the blogosphere is in a snit over a phone interview of Michelle Obama posted by African Press International. Only thing is, the Obama campaign says it’s a complete fabrication.

Read Write Web conducted a survey with some quite interesting results. They asked 20 bloggers and social media consultants (that they claim to know and trust) what kind of money they make with their blogging gigs. The agreement was for RRW not to disclose their names, and for the bloggers themselves to be honest about their earnings.

Although I have ruthlessly defended new media’s potential for legitimacy as a news source, nobody said citizen journalism was a flawless concept. Today a story was posted at iReport.com claiming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a severe heart attack. He did not.

WebPronews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson was present for the "Putting Social Media Into the Newsroom" session at BlogWorld over the weekend. Speakers at this session included Jason Falls, Jeremy Pepper, and Daniel Honigman.

WebPronews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson was present for the "Microjournalism: Breaking news in 140 words or less" session at BlogWorld on Saturday. This one featured Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, and Laura Fitton.

CBS has launched a citizen journalism Web site where users can upload video and images of news events from their mobile phones.

Users of Cbseyemobile.com can upload content from their phones by sending an MMS to the short code "85888" or by email. Users can enter a brief description into the body of the text or email to explain what the content is about.

At every conference or tradeshow, you get a badge.  I have a box full of them on my desk, an increasing number of them with the title of "Speaker" affixed beneath my name. 

A new survey by Brodeur and MarketWire, shows that 75% of journalists use blogs to get ideas for stories.

Journalists may not comment but they are reading…in fact, four in five say they read read blogs at least two to three times a week. Almost 30% of journalists in the survey say they have their own blog.

Journalists consult blogs for story ideas, angles and insights:

In a recent study by Omnicom Group’s Brodeur and Marketwire about how