The Newsroom blog

Welcome to the latest edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our weekly round-up of news about news - stories about news production, publications, apps, digitised resources, events and what is happening with the newspaper collection (and other news collections) at the British Library.  

With You All the Way: This totally charming local newspaper TV advertisement has been produced by  Weekly Independent Newspaper Association (WINA) which represents small independent local publishers, headed by Tindle Newspapers and backed by the Newspaper Society.

The future of the news business: Marc Andreessen's optimistic piece has been much shared and much discussed. "I am very interested to see how Journalism with a capital J can maintain its reputation for truth and accuracy versus upstart blogs and Wikipedia. For Journalism  – big J – the stakes  are very high if that reputation is lost. But it may be that all journalism wins. Maybe we are entering into a new golden age of journalism, and we just haven’t recognized it yet.  We can have the best of all worlds, with both accuracy rising, and stories that hew closer to truth."

Is it 'too trivial' for complex geopolitical stories to use same techniques as for horses that look like Miley Cyrus?: Another much shared piece on the nature of news today from Emily Bell, specifically on how graphic images on social media could be a valuable way to make foreign news more accessible. "A serious challenge to the mainstream press is increasingly coming from new entrants who understand the mechanisms used for conveying mass market trivia and are adapting them to more serious issues. PolicyMic – a New York start-up run by Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz – Vice and Buzzfeed are bringing a far younger audience to Venezuelan politics, Ukrainian riots and inequality."

Vice News, where video works: And so Dylan Byers at Politico reports on the beta invite-only launch of Vice News, a new video service from Vice, "the CNN for Generation Y".

St. Bride's Thanksgiving Service: To help mark the 150th anniversary of the Journalists' Charity, Sky News' Alex Crawford gave this funny, thoughtful address on her profession and why those like her pursue it. "To make a difference,  to have adventures, to expose lies, to hold Governments to account, to bear witness, to take on authorities all over the world, to educate, entertain, enchant, enthrall ... To have fun ..."

Why are all the House of Cards journalists so bad at journalism?: James Ball at The Guardian pokes fun at his small screen rivals.

The year most news home pages looked the same: The Atlantic notices that Bloomberg looks like NBC looks like New Republic looks like Vox Media looks like The Atlantic...

#newsVANE at BBC News Labs: It may sound like it's for techies only, but the work BBC News Labs is doing on scalable reference tools and semantic referencing of news - essentially making digital news content more discoverable by making the most of the knowledge digital content has about itself - has great importance for how we'll be able to research news archives in the future. The project is called #newsVANE.

Seeking a Lead on News, Network Turns to Data-Mining Media Group: More on the importance of news data, this time for the production of news itself. The New York Times reports on tools that mine the Internet for news, and why major news providers (News Corporation, MSNBC, CNN) are teaming up with some smart digital start-ups (Storyful, Vocativ, Dataminr).

Upworthy details why it fact-checks every post: Upworthy says that it curates news stories rather than produce them, but that it believes in fact-checking for all that. So there's hope for the new news media - and its audiences - after all.

Piers Morgan is a victim of arrogance and his accent: Piers Morgan was sacked by CNN and the knives have been out for for the man for whom no one, but no one, seems to have a good word. Gavin Haynes at Vice may have had the knife that dug the deepest.

Harman and Ed Miliband need to rethink how they handle the Daily Mail: Roy Greenslade offers advice to those Labour politicians who once again have taken on the Daily Mail and lost, this time over a 1970s misalliance with a paedophile advocacy group.

Top tips for searching the newspapers: The British Newspaper Archive published a sensible list of searching tips for those new to newspaper archives in search of family history (or any other sort of history).

Regional dailies lose third of readers as cover price rises hit sales: Hold the Front Page reports on the gloomy picture painted for regional newspapers by the latest ABC circulation figures.

How digital growth is countering print decline in regional press: But looking at the sameABC figures Press Gazette sees digital green shoots of recovery.

And finally, BBC Look North presenter Caroline Bilton went viral this week. It's that sinking feeling: