Here's the latest edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our now monthly round-up of news about news. So here are the highlights from February 2015. It's been a full month, what with one thing and another - Peter Oborne quitting the Telegraph, NBC's Brian Williams exposed, the Future of the BBC report, 10 million digitised newspaper pages, plunging circulations, and 64 ways t0 make a news homepage. Plus newspapers as poetry. Read on...

The UK's biggest newspapers are all dying: Graphic of the month from Dadaviz appears to say it all. As Roy Greenslade noted at The Guardian, regional newspaper titles are also suffering yet more substantial sales declines.

How the New York Times works: Terrific long article by Reeves Wiedeman at Popular Mechanics, with great illustrations, on how the New York Times gets published. Essential reading.

Why I have resigned from the Telegraph: Political commentator Peter Oborne quit the Daily Telegraph with this incendiary post from OpenDemocracy, in which he accuses the paper's owners, the Barclay Brothers, of suppressing reports about the HSBC scandal.

The Telegraph's promise to our readers: After Peter Oborne's explosive denunication of his former employers, the Telegraph came up with this much-commented-upon statement of principles.

Snapchat stories: Nieman Lab looks at how six news organisations are making use of the app whose messages disappear after your've read them. But, asks Mathew Ingram at Gigaom, are media companies building another house of cards on SnapChat?

Someone is handing out hand-drawn copies of The Guardian and no one knows why: Mysterious hand-drawn copies of The Guardian from four years ago were being handed out at London Bridge station. It turned out to be the work of artist Charlotte Mann.

Green Party's Natalie Bennett gives 'excruciating' radio interview: Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party, gave an agonisingly awkward radio interview for Nick Ferrari on LBC in which she struggled to answer basic questions about the party's economic policy.

NBC’s Brian Williams recants Iraq story after soldiers protest: Scoop of the month came from American military paper Stars and Stripes, which revealed that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was not on board a helicopter hit and forced down by fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as he had long claimed.

Brian Williams has gone, but false news is bigger business than ever: Emily Bell looks at the acceleration of untrue news stories in the web world, following the exposure of Brian Williams.

64 ways to think about a news homepage: Fantastic illustrated post from Melody Joy Kramer on different ways to present the news online - actual, or potential.

 

Cassetteboy remix the news: Irresistible mash-up of BBC news clips from the Cassetteboy remixing duo.

Jon Stewart to leave The Daily Show: Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show - an essential news source for many in America (and beyond) - is to step down.

Future of the BBC: The Culture, Media and Sport Committee's report Future of the BBC addresses the hot topic of the broadcaster's relationship with and effect upon regional newspapers, and comes up with these recommendations:

The BBC must not expect to receive others' news content without providing something in return. We are attracted by the idea of exchanges of content and information, where the BBC local websites link to the source of local material they have used, and in return the BBC allows others to use its content and embed BBC clips on their sites, where these would be of local interest, under a licence agreement. There need not be a financial transaction. However, we also see the case for the BBC outsourcing the supply of some local content on a commercial basis, where there is an ongoing requirement for such material, and it is a more cost-effective way of meeting this need. We recommend this be ensured by extending the BBC's independent production quota to cover local news.

Why is the BBC just so bad at TV news?: Meanwhile, a provocative opinion piece from Michael Church at The Independent, comparing the BBC News channel to Al Jazeera.

Fox News site embeds unedited Isis video showing brutal murder of Jordanian pilot: To show or not to show? Fox News chose to; The Guardian, reporting on this, and most other news sites, did not.

10 million newspaper pages are now fully searchable at the British Newspaper Archive: The British Newspaper Archive, which is digitising newspapers from the British Library's collection, has reached the magic milestone of 10 million digitised newspaper pages.

How about a search of only original news reporting on Google?: Hmm, interesting proposal from Jeff Jarvis, writing at Medium.

If UK newspapers wrote unhinged Twitter poetry: And finally, Journalism.co.uk offers us some poetic renditions of British newspapers, taken from their Twitter feeds, using the Poetweet site. Here's @MailOnline expressed in rondel form...

Last year we wrote a post on how we were archiving community news websites, or hyperlocal sites, as part of our non-print legal deposit web archiving plans. Part of the great upheaval taking place at the moment in how news is produced, distributed, consumed and shared is the rise in self-produced news web services, usually serving a small community. The trend started in America, where it was given the name 'hyperlocal', and has spread vigorously to the UK, where it has caught the eye of funding bodies, academics and campaigners.

The British Library's strategy for news collection extends beyond newspapers to encompass all forms in which the news is produced and communicated across the UK. So it is important that we capture hyperlocal sites, just the same as we are capturing newspapers, the websites of newspapers, television and radio news. Sites such as The City Talking (Leeds), Brixton Blog, Papur Dre (Caernarfon)), Little Bit of Stone (Stone in Staffordshire) and Port Talbot MagNet are redefining what news is and who owns it.

The blog post attracted some interest, and since writing it we have - with the help of Dave Harte of Birmingham City University - identified some 500 hyperlocal websites from across the UK that we have now started archiving on a regular basis, and tagging as hyperlocal sites so that they and the phenomenon can be more easily traced by researchers in the future.

As part of our commitment to hyperlocal news, we are delighted to be playing host on Saturday 28 February to an 'unconference' organised by hyperlocal champions Talk About Local. An unconference is a conference without an agenda, as the idea is that the audience turns up and decides what the day should be about. So we can't tell you as such what is going to feature during the day, but the Talk About Local blog suggests that themes could include the upcoming general election, crowdfunding, the BBC and local news, working with the police, and working with local newspapers. Many of those attending will be producers of hyperlocal sites - a community of their own - and it is going to be exciting to see how this new newsform, still on a few years old, is shaping up to manage the great challenge of reporting the worlds most immediately around us today.

Tickets for the unconference (named #TAL15) can be booked here.

Times are hard in the news industry, as all will know, and this applies to the news curator's blog as well. It just hasn't proved possible to keep up the weekly production of our St Pancras Intelligencer round-up of the week's news about news which ran for most of 2014. But we're unwilling to see a good title die, so the Intelligencer is making its tentative return as a monthly (or thereabouts). Here's hoping the strategy is a successful one - and let's kick things off again with the news about news in January.

The Future of News -  There have been many reports on the future of news, and the latest comes from BBC head of news James Harding. He argues that

in the internet age, the BBC is more necessary and valuable than ever. The internet is not keeping everyone informed, nor will it: it is, in fact, magnifying problems of information inequality, misinformation, polarisation and disengagement. Our job is keeping everyone informed.

He says the BBC must increase both its local and global coverage and improve its digital services, and it's the increase in local coverage that has excited the most comment from the local newspaper world, which feels threatened by the BBC's reach at a time of shrinking newspaper titles and shrinking revenues.

Future of News: News v Noise - The key points from Harding's report have been published as an "immersive journey" on the BBC news website. 

Emily Bell's 2015 Hugh Cudlipp lecture - Also on the future of news and journalism was this lecture by Emily Bell, the director of Columbia University’s Tow Centre for digital journalism, in which calls for social networks and journalists to work together.

We are seeing unimaginably large new entities, which get their size from publishing not just a selected number of stories but everything in the world. Social networks and search engines are the masters of this universe. As we see the disappearance of print as a significant medium, and the likely decline of broadcast television, the paths our stories and journalism must travel down to reach readers and viewers are being shaped by technologies beyond our control.

The answer, she argues, is for more journalists who a more technically proficient, and for social networks and search engines to hire more technologists who are understand the news.

Because at the moment we have a situation which is not working for either of us. Those of us engaged with what journalism is and will be, who have a direct and vested interest in the protection of free speech and standards for information have a lot to do, and we need to work together, because we are now part of one continuous global information loop.

Newspaper front pages around the world pay tribute to Charlie - The overpowering story of the month has been the murder by two Islamist gunmen of cartoonists and journalists working for French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The aftermath included the 'survivors' issue' with its front cover cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, which had a seven million print run (instead of the usual 60,000). Of the many debates triggered by the calamitious events, some of the most interesting have been on the role of cartoonists. George Brock at The Conversation wrote 'In Praise of the Cartoonist - solitary, studios and searing.' Peter Preston wrote sadly at The Guardian that 'Alas for cartoonists, pen and ink don’t wash on the web' while Ricardo Bilton at Digiday argued quite the opposite, reporting that 'Digital publishers turn to cartoons to cover the news'.

'Muslim-controlled' UK city claim mocked by #FoxNewsFacts hashtag - Much joy was brought by the Twitter hashtag #FoxNewsFacts following Fox News terrorism expert Steve Emerson's bold statement that there were no-go zones in Europe where "non-Muslims just simply don’t go", among them Birmingham. Tweets along the lines of "Mecca Bingo, probable proof of the Islamic domination of Birmingham" and "Spaghetti Junction was specifically designed to make sure all roads lead to Mecca" brought some gaiety to dark times. The Poke gathered a selection of the best of them.

Watch out for @Bellingcat - An interview on Columbia Journalism Review with British blogger Eliot Higgins (previously known as Brown Moses), whose citizen investigative journalism website Bellingcat feature closely-analysed evidence from social media, YouTube and data sources of stories such as the MH17 crash.

Timeline launches news app to give you the context behind the day’s headlines - Another day, another news aggregator app, but Timeline wants to bring you the historical context behind the headlines.

Vice News debuts 'virtual reality news broadcast' of US Millions March - Online news broadcaster Vice News demonstrated a possible advance in news broadcasting when it teamed up with digital artist Chris Milk and filmmaker Spike Jonze for a “virtual reality news broadcast” filmed at the Millions March protest rally at the death of Eric Garner in New York. The 360-degree view film followed Vice News correspondent Alice Speri through the march in December. It's available via the VRSE app for iPhone and Android devices.

Introducing Discover - Snapchat, the service that let's you send messages that get deleted after they've been read, has launched Discover, an app promises "a new way to explore Stories from different editorial teams". According to Nieman Lab, Snapchat’s new Discover feature could be a significant moment in the evolution of mobile news.

The British Library's newspaper collection as it was little more than a year ago (in Colindale) and as it is now (in Boston Spa)

Into the void - The British Library officially opened the National Newspaper Building, its new home for the UK's newspaper archives at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Our blog post takes a look inside the building's storage void and traces the journey from Colindale to Boston Spa for the 60 million volumes held in the nation's newspaper archive.

9.5 million newspaper pages now fully searchable on @BNArchive - Talking of which, the British Newspaper Archive is close to the ten million milestone of digitising historic newspaper pages from the British Library. Just another 440 million to go...

After 44 years The Sun stops publishing topless model pics on page three - Well, so said Press Gazette and many others, including The Sun's sister paper The Times, which broke the news, and there was much debate as to whether changing taste, pressure from lobbyists, or financial arguments had forced the change. Three days later, Page 3 returned.

Google is now a more trusted source of news than the websites it aggregates - Quartz reports that online search engines have overtaken traditional media as the most trusted source for general news and information.