The Sun has been a bit shy to mention that a major source of its info on a man arrested today in relation to the Suffolk murders was actually his MySpace page. The Sun chose not to mention its sister News Corp company, instead referring to it just as a social networking site.
Meanwhile Eurosoc found and linked to this man's MySpace profile, as did MediaGuardian just now. I'm not so sure about feeding the rather morbid curiosity that this kind of horrific event seems to stir, and though I'm normally a very liberal linker, I'd feel uncomfortable referring to this guy because he hasn't been charged.
• NME.com pushes further into US market NME.com held not one but two parties in New York on Friday night, and We Are Scientists played at both. One was a dirty great Club NME night at The Annex, the latest new Microsoft Zune-sponsored location for NME's club nights. The other party was at the British Consulate in New York, no less, where We Are Scientists played a more appropriately low-key acoustic set.
This is all part of NME's plan to break the US through a combination of club nights, tours and through its website. NME.com introduced a New York news bureau last month and an LA bureau last week, which means two full-time news editors supplementing the UK time-zone news by stringing more stories from across the US.
Anthony Thornton, NME.com's digital editor-in-chief, told me that roughly 15% of the site's 1.6m unique users are from the US, but NME is aiming to double that in the next 12 months. He said NME.com is already profitable and the US expansion isn't costly because the infrastructure of the site is already there.
Club nights won't be big money spinners but will promote the NME name, as well as trying to break both British and American unsigned bands around the US. Thornton said the idea behind these tours is like the Motown tours of the Sixties - four or five bands on the bill for a one-night event. The first will be "NME presents the Kaiser Chiefs" on 13 April at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, and that moves on to Toronto, Chicago and San Francisco.
The site's first blogs roll out his week, starting with a behind-the-news blog, plus there are plans to expand the gigs and tickets section and there will be an NME showcase at SXSW conference in Texas in March.
And how does America's music press feel about this invasion? Rolling Stone, Spin and Billboard were all at the consulate on Friday night; Thornton said there's "an enormous fondness" for the NME in America so they appear to be welcoming us Brits with open arms.
• Mobile geo-journalism MA Photography students at the University of Brighton are working with Nokia and mobile communities specialist Ymogen to experiment with multimedia storytelling on mobiles. The idea is to tie the multimedia stuff - video, photos etc - with geo-location tools to try out what the group describes as "new formats of mobile and citizen journalism".
Nokia provided some of its Nseries handsets (like the one I lost...) and the students also have a GPS device. Eighteen students are working on the "Geo-stories" project led by Ymogen, who were picked out at one of the BBC's Innovation labs to explore the possibilities of geo-journalism. The starting point here was sport, and Ymogen's CEO Mark Hardwick told me that creatively, the idea was to build on the kind of work done by Magnum in its photo essays.
That piece is more art than media, he said, but there is real potential to create this kind of package from user content. Hardwick gave the example of the New York marathon piece and said that could be compiled by a journalist with an overview of the race and interlaced with photos, video and text from the runners themselves - a view from inside the race.
It's hard to get excited about this kind of storytelling without actually seeing it, but it will all be posted online at the end of January.
• L'autopsy de Le Web Loic Le Meur, organiser of the Le Blogs conference and indirectly the cause of collapse at TechCrunch UK, has issued a 3 million-ish word statement on his site about the conference and criticism from bloggers. If anyone gets to the end of that post, could they let me know?
• A Google/Orange phone? David Smith in the Observer yesterday on a possible video iPod-style handset designed to encourage take-up of mobile web services. Orange have been to the "Googlepex" in California to discuss how Google's search technology could be incorporated on a more user-friendly handset. This probably wouldn't be on sale until 2008 but is likely to offer geo-targeted services like listings for cinemas, restaurants and shops near the user and that could combine Google's map service.
• Big media's YouTube rival: announcement this week?
More details on the video sharing site that a few big US companies are brewing in an attempt to rival YouTube. International Herald Tribune reports intense negotiations between NBC Universal, Viacom, Viacom (possibly) and News Corp, weirdly, which has its own video service to push in the form of MySpace video.
This story says the "unprecedented" service could even be announced this week, though there's clearly some fascinating wrangling going on between these big media cheeses. The IHT's source said these executives do really want to do the deal, but "ten minutes after they do it they'll want to kill themselves". They are competitors, after all.
The pros for these guys are muscling in on their share of the still-booming online ad market, and also fulfilling the demand for mainstream film and TV that punters evidently want supplied to them online and on demand. But the cons:
"Such a site would face huge obstacles. All the partners in the venture are wary of anything that looks like an industry consortium -- especially one that risks looking flat-footed or backward in the face of nimbler technology upstarts."
• Huffington Post's big ideas
Former chief of publisher services at AOL's Advertiser.com, Jim Smith, is to join the Huffington Post as chief revenue officer. Smith will oversee advertising sales, business development and marketing. He has also worked as SVP of partner alliances for AOL dealing with the likes of Sony, Nintendo, Chase, Travelcity and so on, so he is well placed to help the HuffPo execute its growth plans.
Arianna Huffington's media/politics/celebrity site signed a major ad deal with IAC in June, scored $5m in funding from Softbank in August and announced plans to move into original journalism to report on the 2008 elections. That began with the appointment last month of Melinda Henneberger, former New York Times reporter and Newsweek editor, as the HuffPo's political editor.
• New stuff - Reuters is launching a video news service for mobiles that will be ad-supported. From MocoNews.
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