Fairfax Digital launches The Vine »

Fairfax Digital has launched The Vine, a news site targetted to GenY. It features lots of social network components — UGC, member profiles, recommendations and the like.

“We found that there are three key things that young people seek when they are consuming media. That they can participate, that they can express themselves and that if they contribute to the site, the prospect that they could become famous.

“They want their fifteen megabytes of fame - that desire to have peer recognition.”

This is the Kwerky project that got some press pick ups back in January. It’ll be interesting to see how the site develops.

MetaCarta GeoSearch News »

MetaCarta’s GeoSearch News is a newly launched service that indexes news articles from a bunch of sources (the wires and masthead news sites primarily), mines the content for location data, and then plots those on a searchable Google map.

Nifty!

Mike van Niekerk interview: Future of journalism series »

The Editor’s Weblog is running a series of articles on the future of journalism. First off is Mike van Niekerk, editor-in-chief of online for Fairfax Media (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age).

Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

… We must be careful not to allow our better instincts drowned out by what one thinks the audience wants. For example, stories about Britney Spears are regularly highly rated on our websites. Those kinds of stories can be a temptation, but we must be careful about upholding our brand values.

Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I have to be very cautious with this answer. The economics of new media make it very difficult to fund investigative journalism in the same way it once was. If you’re talking about the kind of journalism that keeps governments and corporations at check, I am concerned about its sustainability in the future.

Related: the ABC is launching a whole bunch of hyperlocal regional sites, populated by repurposed existing ABC news content, and user generated content, and is setting up a continuous news desk in Ultimo.