Well, it's been quite a long haul, but almost six months after starting our series of Social Media seminars and workshops for BBC production staff we finished yesterday, May 18th, with a session looking at the meeting point of journalism and social media.

The afternoon was designed and presented by our old colleague from BBC Audio & Music, Chris Berthoud, who's now in BBC Journalism. Chris talked to Mike Rudin, presenter/writer of the Conspiracies show and Matthew Eltringham of the BBC's UGC Hub, and took a close look at NPR's Public Insight Project, bringing in the project's Brady Carlson for a Skype chat and audience Q&A.

The second half of the afternoon was taken up with some pretty fast and furious brainstorming, the five teams having to pitch their ideas to (gulp) Today editor Ceri Thomas and Newsnight editor Peter Rippon. 

Among other things, we took a look at a bunch of news and blog aggregators including
Twoogle 
Twitterfall
Scoopler 
Google Blog
Newstin 

So that's it for now; we're going to be rolling out some of these sessions again in Scotland this Summer and Autumn.Until then, our thanks go out to BBC Training/ Future Now's Andy Wilson and Penny Vernham for all their help on this project. Oh, and here's a couple of pics or so we shot yesterday...
Simon

The financial crisis: what does it mean for the creative industries, the arts, the cultural sector in the UK? Our friends John Kieffer and Shelagh Wright, along with John Newbigin and John Holden have put together a rather fabulous little collection of essays looking at this very question. Running to a 100 pages, After the Crunch features essays by a whole bunch of luminaries - artists, entrepreneurs, thought leaders and the like - including Clay Shirky, Tony Hall, Charles Leadbeater, Richard Florida and Chris Smith.

We're also in there, having contributed a sawn-off version of our essay-in-development The Trouble With Poetry, which we first rolled out as a presentation for IT4Arts back in March.

There's a limited edition of the book available, handsomely designed by Elmwood. If you can't track down a copy, you can download a PDF of it here.
Simon