Finbarr O’Reilly has won the best published photograph award in the Diageo Business Reporting awards for his images of gold mining in Congo.

For the other short-listed entries and Finbarr’s words of acceptance, as voiced by former Reuters Africa Editor Barry Moody, see this video:

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, is in London promoting his new book ‘Free’ and spoke at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

He told the audience that, amongst other things, the terms ‘news’, ‘journalist’ and ‘journalism’ were being rendered meaningless by the democratisation of content via low-cost production tools on the Web.

The substance of Chris’s remarks has been covered well elsewhere but, alarmed by his comments about news, I caught up with him after the event to ask him what hope there was for journalists.

How should news websites cater for the appetite of news-hungry audiences for running commentary during major breaking stories like Iran’s post-election turmoil? The challenge here is to match what TV stations can do when they switch between news bulletins to rolling 24 hour coverage. Only the web ought to be able to do so much more given its scope for interactivity.

In an ideal world you’d want to provide the fastest, most thoroughly verified reports around the clock whether they or not they are from conventional journalists.  And as a user I think you’d also want to be pointed in the direction of where you can find out more. If all this was easy then it would have been done by now. But it’s a lot of work. And all news organisations have had to strike compromises on one or more of those counts.

So what’s the state of the art?

The live blog

The Guardian (live news blog), the NYT (the Lede Blog), the Atlantic (Andrew Sullivan) and the Huffington Post (Nico Pitney) are among those media organisations using this approach to sample the best material across the Web. This method allows blog anchors to annotate content and to point out whether there are doubts or not about its accuracy. It also allows them to point to the originating sources to help participants make up their own minds.

But running these live blogs around the clock is a heavy commitment. And all four had sizable breaks in their coverage.

Zach Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a great piece of evidence for the ‘nothing new under the sun’ debate. The ‘Telepot’ competition in the Penny Illustrated Newspaper of 1913 encouraged readers to condense telegrams into just 12 words.

If you share the view that the telegraph was the Victorian internet then perhaps this was the (very late) Edwardian Twitter.

Alan Patrick has an interesting post  on his Broadstuff blog that reduces the complexities of social media dynamics to two lines — supply (red line) as measured by the volume of social media produced as more of the available populaton gets involved, and demand as measured by the average amount of time each user devotes to social media.

The chart captures well a couple of things that I keep coming across — 1)  that early adopters of social media devote the greatest amount of time to it; and 2) that you need a reasonable proportion of people producing before the activity makes sense in terms of the value of the output being worth more than the value of the input.