Go and find something out

If anybody's planning to stay up/get up early to check on progress in the election across the pond, it might be worth checking out the New York Times's various interactive gizmos - including a pop-up election dashboard, and video updates every half hour from the NYT newsroom.

The 2008 Presidential Campaign gives Time magazine's James Poniewozik the chance to expound his theory that the 24-hour news cycle is dead. In its place, thanks to digital technology and the 'unofficial media', is the 24-minute news cycle.

"If you follow campaign news, you'll see this cycle in action several times a day, with stories sprouting, blooming and dying like flowers in time-lapse photography," he says.

If radical thinking is the solution to declining newspaper circulations then this proposal from the American Recovering Journalist blog is at the sharpest end of the most acute cutting edge. To secure their futures, suggests Marc Andreesen, newspapers should stop printing paper copies now and force their readers (and avertisers) to appreciate the online product. I think the idea is closer to insanity than radicalism, but perhaps I'm missing a glorious business opportunity.

Here's a nice post from technology journalist Charles Arthur on why news doesn't have to be, well, new. The Brand/Russell broadcast, Arthur points out, should have been cold potatoes by the time the Mail on Sunday picked it up more than a week after it had gone out. Not so, as we have seen. And he gives a neat definition that encapsulates a newspaper law: "News is what the reader doesn’t yet know, but you can persuade them they want to".

Grants for university students are having to be cut by the government from next year, after they had reportedly made an overspending blunder.

Although poorer students are unlikely to be effected, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) said they found a financial deficit of £200m.

Despite the DIUS improving student financial grants this year, according to BBC News the upper limit to receive a student grant will be lowered from £60,000 to £50,020 next year.