Your first reaction to the news that a college offers a class in YouTube might be to dredge up old "underwater basket-weaving" jokes; learning the school is in California, might be less surprising – after all, Stanford offers a course in Facebook apps.
Topix, the local news aggregator that is owned by several big U.S. newspaper chains (Gannett, The Tribune and McClatchy), is doing what amounts to a relaunch of the site and adding “citizen journalism” or social media to the mix, as well as moving to a dot-com domain (it used to be dot-net). Founder and CEO Rich Skrenta — who describes on his personal blog how this came out of an attempt to “de-suckify” the site — has a blog post at Topix about the changes, and says:
The Knight Foundation has launched a website aimed at helping “citizen journalism” or community media operations find resources and best practices.
Called the Knight Citizen News Network, it’s managed by J-Lab — the Institute for Interactive Journalism — with content created in part by Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media and by Amy Gahran of I, Reporter (as well as Right Conversations and the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits).