Have you ever thought what it must be like for someone who wants to ring a newsroom? It's bound to be a daunting task. What's the number? Who do I ask for?

That's all changing thanks to social media.

The BBC Newsline social media project began about a year ago. We didn't want to get left behind and we wanted to use it to promote our content and get more stories.

Twelve months on we have almost 10,000 fans on our Facebook page and almost 5,000 followers on Twitter.

That's 12,000 people who get any content we post, directly into their news feed. They in turn have the choice to share it, and many do.

It's had another consequence too. It's made the BBC Newsline programme accessible to thousands of people.

They comment on the stories we're doing and make suggestions about how we do them. It's a place of lively debate. Our contributors talk to each other and to us.

It's also an invaluable way of gathering news. An exclusive interview by Health Correspondent Marie-Louise Connolly with the family of a baby who died from the Pseudomonas infection came after the child's father posted on our page and we contacted him privately.

We were alerted to a small earthquake in Donegal when a man posted on one of our reporters' work Facebook pages that his house had been shaking.

And a recent story about a child drowning on a so-called ghost estate in the Irish Republic prompted us to ask, via BBC Newsline's Facebook page, whether any of our followers had similar concerns about where they lived.

It sparked a lively debate about who was liable and we followed up with a TV piece featuring one particularly badly affected estate. Within days of the report, the contractor was back on site doing remedial work to make it safer.

It's increasingly a big part of how we gather news. On one day in January nine minutes of content on BBC Newsline's twenty eight minute programme was the direct result of stories sourced via social media.

We're getting smarter about how we use it. When our Education Correspondent Maggie Taggart broke the story about changes to special education provision in schools, we posted a link on Facebook to the News Online piece. Within an hour we had a dozen affected families commenting on the thread. We were able to contact several who agreed to take part in our radio and television reports. Their stories greatly enriched our coverage.

Social media allows us to reach more people and promote BBC Newsline to a new audience. In one week our Facebook reach was more than twenty four thousand people - that's those who've seen any of our content. And the bulk of them are in a younger demographic, seventy five per cent of them aged 18 to 44, split evenly between men and women.

For journalists social media does not mean the end of contact books and phone calls and quiet conversations with key people, but used correctly it can complement traditional forms of newsgathering.

Richard Jones, founder of the hyperlocal website Saddleworth News, soon found his patch in the national spotlight:

It's January 2011. In a cramped upstairs room at a car repair garage in Oldham, I sit next to a couple of other local journalists as we interview David Cameron about the Conservatives' prospects in the forthcoming Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. It's my third party leader in a week, after Nick Clegg (above) and Ed Miliband.

A radio reporter asks whether the by-election is a referendum on the coalition. He's interrupted by giggling. It's my daughter, perched on my knee.

"There we are, you had your answer," says the Prime Minister, turning in her direction. "How old are you?"

"Fifteen months," I say.

"There you are, 15 months and laughing at that idea!"

I was covering the by-election for Saddleworth News, a hyperlocal website which I started writing in February 2010.

A few weeks before my wife had gone back to work, leaving me as a stay-at-home dad to our first child. I'd done various journalism jobs in TV and radio, staff and freelance, since graduating from university in 2002. I spent the best part of six years at Sky News. But my wife earned more than I did, which made it an obvious decision for me to give up work to become a full-time father.

I set up Saddleworth News for two main reasons. The first was pure selfishness. I didn't want to leave journalism forever and knew it would be harder to get back in with a gaping hole on my CV. I also thought my brain would appreciate something to think about every day that didn't involve nappies, feeding or 'heads, shoulders, knees and toes'.

The second reason was more public-spirited. We'd only recently moved to Saddleworth, a collection of largely rural Yorkshire villages on the Manchester side of the Pennines. With just one or two articles a day in the Oldham paper, and some monthly freesheets and magazines, there was relatively little news coverage of an area which has a distinct identity. I hoped my skills might be of some use to the local community.

At first I set aside an hour a day to work on the site during my daughter's afternoon nap, and gave myself a target of one post every weekday. The site was established as a blog as I thought one daily update would be enough to give regular visitors something new to look at without putting me under too much pressure to constantly come up with new material.

The site hadn't been going long when a teenager sadly killed himself at a nearby railway station. A passenger on the train involved was posting updates and pictures from the scene on Twitter. After getting in touch and asking if I could use his content, I was able to quickly publish it in articles about the incident.

With the local paper not getting anything online about the story until the following day, my site was the only resource of information about why the trains between Huddersfield and Manchester weren't running. The site's hits increased more than five-fold overnight, mostly thanks to Google searches.

It was an early lesson in the value of publishing content that other media outlets can't or won't produce. Over the following weeks, every time the site had a spike in traffic like that the hit stats always settled back down at a higher level than before, until several hundred unique users became the daily norm rather than the exception.

If publishing stories faster than other media is one service hyperlocal sites can provide, doing issues in more depth is another, and it's surely a more valuable one too.

I've always enjoyed covering politics. Before the 2005 general election I spent months on Sky's election unit helping to prepare its coverage. As polling day approached in 2010, I knew that both the Westminster constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth and the local wards being contested on Oldham Council would be closely fought, particularly between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Pondering how to approach the campaign on Saddleworth News, I mentioned to a newspaper reporter that I was thinking of doing full interviews with all the candidates. He said he'd had a similar idea but had been told by his editor that "there wasn't space in the paper" for it.

Woolas held the seat narrowly after a couple of recounts, but his Lib Dem opponent Elwyn Watkins mounted a rare and extraordinary legal challenge to the result, on the grounds that Woolas had told lies about his character in those campaign leaflets. Over the weeks ahead I wrote lots of articles about this, reporting on various small developments in the saga.

By the time the case ended in a shock triumph for Watkins and bitter defeat for Woolas, Saddleworth News had by far the largest online archive of material about the story. Checking my web stats, I found that people from Saddleworth and much further afield kept finding old articles I'd written, including my campaign interviews with all the protagonists. They were the interviews which didn't exist anywhere else because nobody else had bothered to do them. When national journalists arrived to cover the subsequent by-election clutching print-outs of my articles which they'd read on the train, I had evidence I'd been doing something right.

The depth of my coverage of the Woolas saga and by-election helped to raise the site's profile, and also taught me another lesson about online journalism. The internet is forever. No longer is a news story tomorrow's fish and chip paper, forgotten about within a day of being written. It can be discovered and read months and even years later by people searching on Google. So, if your article is going to have a long life, best make sure it's good.

Richard Jones (@rlwjones) is a freelance journalist, blogger about journalism and visiting lecturer in online at the University of Leeds. In a forthcoming post he talks about whether you can make money from hyperlocal journalism. Saddleworth News is now a part of the digital journalism course at University Campus Oldham.

This article is adapted with kind permission from a forthcoming book, What Do We Mean by Local? Grass-roots Journalism - Its Death and Rebirth, to be published by Abramis later this month.  

It's not supposed to work this way.

Conventional wisdom says viral videos are less than three minutes long, sometimes less than a minute (averaging 1 minute 42 seconds apparently). Thirty-minute videos aren't designed for the attention-deficit internet audience.

Until, that is, a video produced by the Invisible Children NGO which in the space of a week has chalked up almost 80 million views on YouTube and another 20 million or so elsewhere, to become the most successful viral video campaign in internet history.

There are several layers of irony connected with the video's success that are not lost on Africa, especially not in Uganda which to a large extent is the focus of the video.

Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army wreaked havoc in northern Uganda, but the 20-year war there ended some six years ago. Kony's much diminished gang moved on and there's peace in northern Uganda today.

As TMS Ruge, a prominent Ugandan blogger, wrote soon after the video went viral:

"Kony has been on the run for 25-plus years. On a continent three times the size of America. Catching and stopping him is not a priority of immediate concern... How many of you know that more Ugandans died in road accidents last year (2,838) than have died in the past three years from LRA attacks in whole of central Africa (2,400)?"

The irony is not lost on Semhar Arai, founder and executive director of the Diaspora African Women's Network (DAWN). As she said on Twitter recently:

"There are 1 billion ppl in #Africa. 1 BILLION. Did anyone check to see how many of those billion were a part of the 100 million video views?"

I suspect very few Ugandans have seen the video.

You see, since the end of February the internet in East Africa has been incredibly slow. A cable connecting this part of the continent was damaged and it's still not been fixed. All of us in this part of the world - Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Ethiopia - continue to experience the effects. Watching internet video is a frustratingly slow experience at the best of times; at the moment it's pretty much impossible.

That's not to say Ugandans haven't reacted. They have. For its part the Ugandan government felt it had no choice but to release a statement, stating the obvious - that the war is long over:

"Misinterpretations of media content may lead some people to believe that the LRA is currently active in Uganda. It must be clarified that at present the LRA is not active in any part of Uganda. Successfully expelled by the Ugandan People's Defence Forces in mid-2006, the LRA has retreated to dense terrain within bordering countries in the Central African area. They are a diminished and weakened group with numbers not exceeding 300."

Like a sandbag against a tsunami, it's unlikely the Ugandan voice has been heard by the majority of clicktavists and #Kony2012 hashtag followers. Similarly, for the victims of Joseph Kony's LRA. Those that have voiced their opinions are not positive about the video and its content.

"What is this going to help? Kony cut off my arm - will the video bring it back?" asked Angella Atim. "Where were these groups when we were being killed by Kony?" added Atim, whose left arm was chopped off when she could no longer walk on the second day after being captured by the rebels.

Screenings of the #Kony2012 video organised in the northern Ugandan town of Lira provoked anger and were eventually abandoned. "People kept on getting upset," said Victor Ochen of the African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET). "They were wondering: 'If this is about northern Uganda, how come it's dominated by non-Ugandans? What is it about now? This is an insult,'" he said. "And they were saying whoever did this movie was celebrating their suffering."

Other Ugandans (left) simply ask: "Why are we talking about this?"

The saga is not over yet. The Invisible Children have released a follow-up video to counter the criticism the first video has received. The group is planning a "massive day of action" across US cities on 20 April. The day could also be a day of bewilderment for Ugandans. As Ugandan blogger Rosebell Kagumire said on YouTube soon after #Kony2012 began to go viral:

"My major problem with this video is that it simplifies the story of millions of people in northern Uganda... Right now Joseph Kony is not in Uganda. The situation in the video was five or six years ago. The situation has tremendously improved in northern Uganda... It's about post-conflict recovery right now and we don't see those issues of now what needs to be done... We need to see the situation which is currently on the ground, which I don't see in the video."

Graham Holliday - @noodlepie - is a foreign correspondent, photojournalist, university lecturer and BBC journalism trainer. He lives in Africa and has worked on blogs, social media and citizen journalism projects since 2002.

The BBC has reportedly revealed that it suffered a "sophisticated cyber-attack" following a campaign of persistent intimidation from the Iranian authorities. 

Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, is due to give a speech at the Royal Television Society later today, describing how, alongside a cyber-attack, BBC Persian's satellite feeds into Iran have been jammed, and its London phone lines were swamped by automated calls.

In an extract from the speech, released by the BBC in advance, Mark Thompson explains the difficulty of proving the origin of the internet attack:

"It is difficult, and may prove impossible, to confirm the source of these attacks, though attempted jamming of BBC services into Iran is nothing new and we regard the coincidence of these different attacks as self-evidently suspicious.

It now looks as if those who seek to disrupt or block BBC Persian may be widening their tactics."

Thompson claims that there is a systematic campaign to both intimidate staff members into leaving the BBC Persian service and to turn BBC staff into informers to provide the Iranian authorities with information.

Last month, Thompson described how the sister of a staff member working for the BBC Persian service was detained, intimated and held in solitary confinement by the Iranian authorities. Thompson says that there have been many attempts by Tehran to jam the BBC's broadcasts to the country, where the service is believed to have an audience of millions.

In February, Thompson wrote:

"The BBC calls on the Iranian government to repudiate the actions of its officials.

We also ask governments and international regulatory bodies to put maximum pressure on Iran to desist in this campaign of intimidation, persistent censorship and a disturbing abuse of power."

Thompson is right to be cautious of claiming definitively that the government in Tehran was responsible for the internet attack on the BBC.

Even if a computer involved in the attacks was found to be located in an Iranian military base that doesn't necessarily mean it was an attack done with the knowledge of Iran's authorities.

It could have been compromised by hackers in other countries. After all, think of all the spam you receive every day - that's not sent by computers belonging to the spammers. Instead they're from PCs that cyber criminals have commandeered and turned into a botnet for their own purposes.

At the same time, of course, we shouldn't be naive. If BBC staff and their families are suffering from a growing campaign of intimidation, then it perhaps wouldn't be a surprise if the hostility also spilled out onto the internet.

It is not expected that Thompson will give any more details of the latest attacks.

When it comes to journalists enjoying a close relationship with listeners, viewers and readers, it's hard to beat local media.

Tell a story well, or badly, and you'll soon hear direct from your audience - whether you're out walking the same patch tomorrow or just standing in the chip shop queue.

So it's not surprising that our teams in BBC English Regions have been embracing the immediacy and connectedness of social networking for some time - from Look North on Facebook and Dean Jackson's The Beat on Twitter, to newsgathering experiments like BBC London's award-winning deployment of Crowdmap during 2010′s Tube strikes.

But until now there's never been a unified document for BBC staff bringing together these activities and our plans to push them forward.

We've just launched English Regions' social media strategy for 2012. It builds on two existing documents: the BBC's overarching social media guidelines and - as we're part of the BBC's News Group - News' own social media guidance.

Creating a single social strategy for the BBC's local and regional output is challenging because of the breadth and variety of what we do. English Regions has 40 radio stations, some in big cities and some in the most rural of patches. We produce a wide range of TV output, including our 6.30 news programmes, the current affairs magazine Inside Out, our regional football league show Late Kick Off, and a weekly section of BBC1′s Sunday Politics.

We produce online news via the BBC News website (with 42 local indexes), and cover cutting-edge music in partnership with Radio 1 and other networks via BBC Introducing. Last but not least, we're geographically spread: over 3,000 staff, from the England/Scotland border to the Channel Islands.

What's needed is a strong framework which will, we hope, work across the board while still allowing flexibility based on locality and topic.

The first part of the strategy lays out our ten social media objectives for 2012. Here are three of the most important:

All English Regions journalists and programme-makers to have/develop a working knowledge of social media tools and their editorial value

Social media skills are essential for 2012′s media professionals, not a nice-to-have. This objective sets that in stone and demonstrates our commitment to deliver.

We're not saying that every one of our people must tweet. But they all need to understand how key social media tools work, why they're important, and how to use them in a professional capacity. This work has been under way for a while, largely thanks to our colleagues at the BBC College of Journalism who've been running excellent courses and hands-on newsroom sessions since 2009.

Social media to be a formal element in performance review - especially growth (or otherwise) in engagement stats

Like many organisations, we've often been guilty of analysing our social media performance too superficially.

Naturally we track Twitter follower stats and the number of 'likes' on Facebook. And between newsrooms we share tales and tips on finding great stories and contacts. But we've not given enough focus to measuring engagement around our accounts.

How much quality interaction are we generating? Are we sharing the right stories in the right way? How deep is our impact locally - are we just talking to ourselves?

Local and regional resources are always at a premium, so assessing whether we're making the best use of them in the social media sphere is something we're enshrining in our annual performance review for each region.

And we'll be adding intelligence on our social media activities to the online performance figures we already send around our teams monthly.

Minimum levels of Facebook and Twitter coverage in each area

Again, like many large organisations, the speed and enthusiasm with which we've embraced social media has varied from place to place, often dependent on the skills and interests of those who work there.

This objective aims to plug gaps where they exist, ensuring the audience will be able to keep tabs on its local or regional BBC via Facebook or Twitter, whichever part (or parts) of England they have an affinity with.

In the second part of our strategy document, there's detailed practical guidance to how our social media accounts should be managed.

Some is the kind of good practice any skilled community manager has employed since the year dot. How should we phase out an account elegantly if it's run its course? What tone should we adopt with our updates?

And some guidance is specific to BBC English Regions: who, for instance, needs to approve a new account before it's signed off? How do we ensure our three strands of output (radio, TV and online) are reflected in a joined up way on social networks, regardless of how their teams are structured and managed?

Here's the full strategy document.

What do you think of it? I'd be interested to hear from you via the comments below - or you can contact me on Twitter.

Robin Morley is social media lead for BBC English Regions, and a member of the BBC England new media management team.

Pinterest is fascinating and addictive... but it could let its users do more things, more easily. Well that's how it seems after a few days of trying it out.

I wanted to experiment with something different from the collections of pictures of women's shoes, clothes, home decorating ideas and fancy foods its fans currently specialise in (as I previously wrote about).

And I wanted to use its collaborative features to build a little Pinterest corner with the help of other users.

My Places As They Used To Be (below) has done pretty well in just over a fortnight: 185 followers, and growing daily; 91 pictures (or 'pins' in Pinterest parlance); and 48 other people able to contribute.

What's more, only 18 of the pictures were 'pinned' by me. Several sociable people I don't know came up with the rest. And one collaborative soul has even gone the extra mile and created corresponding pins in my linked Google Map, which I also opened to general contributions.

I haven't got much to complain about. But my frustration comes from the clunky process required to do what I said I'd do at the top of the board: to invite "as many people as I can to contribute to this board - just follow and I will add you". Pinterest is set up so you can't let people contribute to a board unless you follow each other.

So the first job was to follow people who have shown an interest in my board. But that wasn't so easy.

If you look at your Profile page on Pinterest you can click on 'Followers' and simply press a button to Follow them back. But on an individual Board, for some reason, the Followers sign doesn't click through to a list. Nor does the Profile page Followers link include the Followers of your separate Boards.

So the only way to invite Followers to contribute is to go through all the emails from Pinterest telling you who has started Following the board, click through to them on the site, and Follow them.

Then, unless you want to write down everyone's names, the quickest way I've found to add them as contributors is to go through the alphabet, letter by letter in the 'add contributors' box and click on each of the names suggested that begins with that letter.

But even after all that you can't count on your contributors staying on the list. Within about 20 minutes of adding a load of names, half of them had disappeared (and I'm convinced they hadn't all taken themselves off the list). One person has already asked me to put him back on the contributor list twice, because Pinterest's system dropped him off for no apparent reason.

These are minor problems - some technical, some a matter of design policy. My point is this: why not have a system in which a user can start a board and simply have a setting that allows anyone on Pinterest to contribute to it?

Pinterest is still a work in progress, still in beta: that's why it's officially 'invitation only' - although I'm pretty sure everyone's invitation request is followed by an invitation in a day or two. It has so much potential, and no doubt these are just teething troubles. But, to move beyond its existing demographic, I'd say it needs to create easy, different kinds of usage by coming up with small technical tweeks that lead to interesting new results socially.

The New York Times uses three principles when deciding how its journalists should use social media: do it strategically, be different, and strive for meaningful engagement with the audience.

That was the message from Liz Heron, social media editor of The New York Times and the keynote speaker at today's news:rewired conference in London.

"Don't be content to skate on the social media surface," she added.

Heron told an audience of British journalists and social media types that her paper now has 400 journalists using Twitter accounts, with 50 of them also using the new Facebook Subscribe feature that lets Facebook users receive their posts without having to 'friend' them. (It's what Facebook wants individuals to do now instead of using Facebook Pages, which are more for companies, causes etc.)

Heron said that persuading reporters it is safe to use their own Facebook accounts for the Subscribe feature could be "a hard sell", because it mixes the personal with the professional. She has had to "show people how to keep pictures of their children private".

The social media landscape has changed a lot in the past year and Heron's own role within Times had gone from evangeliser to fighting off demand from colleagues who wanted to get into social media.

At the same time she admitted to suffering from "platform fatigue" as more and more social media options become available. "How to have time to engage these new social platforms and still have time to see your friends and family?" is the new dilemma.

She mentioned Tumblr and Quora as being in the pending tray while she has been "thinking a lot" about rising star Pinterest.

Because of its massive subscriber base, Facebook remains a key platform. She is encouraging its use among two main groups of reporters: foreign correspondents, because three quarters of Facebook users are outside the US, and writers on the 'How You Live' desk.

For the latter, which charts changes in society, she found that, for instance, a question put to her Facebook subscribers on the subject of depression and students produced a great haul of "high-quality comments" that fed into a feature that one of her colleagues was writing.

Google+ is a new platform whose strengths, Heron said, look like being its ability to facilitate "deep discussions" together with the possibilities offered by Google Hangouts (discussed as a tool for journalism on this blog). 

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to find a more and more central role in the paper's interaction with its readers. So, for instance, through Twitter readers are invited to guide reporting in real time by asking for fact-checks on news stories or political speeches with a special hashtag. At the paper, a special team sets about answering the queries.

And on primary election nights, hand-selected tweets from readers are now put on the Times' homepage.

Asked about how reporters prioritise their time between social media and more conventional reporting, Heron said that for sophisticated users social media just becomes part of their process, and in many cases reporters are actually saving time because Twitter, for instance, can be a great - and efficient - source of new stories.

As to how all of this fits into the company's business model, Heron said that referrals to the Times' website from social media are strong. The Times has a online subscription model but it's more of "a fence than a wall", and all content linked to from social media is free.

Overall, Heron's account gave a powerful view of social media interaction for a big media organisation as being a sophisticated mix of 'push' - getting your content out there - and 'pull' - gaining access to new ideas and people.

Success is not measured in traffic numbers, said Heron. It's about "did we get something of journalistic value out of that interaction?"

Footage from the sessions at news:rewired is being filmed by the College of Journalism and will be posted on this website shortly. You can also follow the sessions during the day on the College of Journalism Twitter account.

BBC News and The Huffington Post are easily leading the way worldwide at "social distribution", according to Newswhip, an innovative start-up company that monitors which news stories are spreading fastest through the social web.

It's clear that BBC News has come a long way in social media in the past couple of years and it is now using it effectively to strengthen the reach of BBC content.

In terms of numbers the @BBCBreaking account now has more than 2.5 million followers on Twitter; @BBCWorld, 1.5 million. And on Facebook, BBC World News has around 1.5 million friends.

More and more of our correspondents, reporters and producers are now tweeting. The BBC's social media editor, Chris Hamilton, runs a team of journalists who are expert in sifting through social media sites to find original news content and get it onto BBC platforms.

Meanwhile, BBC North West, BBC Wales, BBC Northern Ireland and BBC London, to name but a few, have appointed social media producers to find content on social media platforms and engage effectively with audiences.

In the past couple of years, the BBC has also put in place an effective social media training programme, bringing thousands of our journalists up to speed and ensuring they are comfortable with handling the new material and the new social spaces.

In November 2009, the College of Journalism started a one-day social media course called 'Making the Web Work for You' which soon broke all attendance records for a non-mandatory BBC News training course. It equipped journalists with the new digital tools they needed to find people, case studies and stories, and it set them up on Twitter and Facebook accounts to source content and interact with our audience.

To date nearly 3,000 BBC News staff have received training in some aspect of social media. We still run courses on internet tools, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and social media strategy and best practice. We do one-to-one sessions, tailored training on social media for individual BBC teams, and we run a 'Social Media Consultancy' - a kind of 'hit squad' for training at any BBC station that requires its services.

We have some of the best social media trainers in the world, led by @cward1e, @suellewellyn, @ramaamultimedia and @marcsettle, who ensure that the content is constantly refreshed, which is not easy when new tools are coming on stream almost daily.

We have moved into specialist training on smartphones for newsgathering - which is becoming more important - and training on tablets will follow.

The past two years has taught us the value of training. It is pleasing when the results start to show.

Chris Walton is a project editor specialising in digital media at the BBC College of Journalism.

We're marking a small milestone at the College of Journalism this week - the fifth birthday of our website. It was on 17 January 2007 that BBC journalists first had the chance to sample this extraordinary online facility.

The site was created by Kevin Marsh, who joined the College after a long career on the frontline at BBC News culminating in editorship of the Today programme, along with a team of able colleagues who brought both editorial and technical expertise to the project. 

Kevin was clear that the site should not only be for BBC journalists but by them as well. Many journalists have an instinctive suspicion of training in any form, believing that people only need it if there is something wrong with them; they don't want to go back to the classroom.

But they are happy to learn and take pointers from senior practitioners who they respect and admire; people who speak with the benefit of experience and proven talent.  

That's why so much of the material on the site is presented by some of the BBC's most senior and prominent journalists - people like Huw Edwards, Allan Little and David Shukman. Other sections are presented by the people who do the job themselves every day, and who speak with credibility and authority as a result.

Learning craft skills is at the heart of the site, but its ambition extends beyond that - to ethics, standards, the law and the sort of basic background information that helps people to tackle difficult and sensitive subjects, such as reporting religion or the Middle East. And there is topical debate about current coverage and developing themes in the wider craft of journalism.

By early 2010, the fruits of all this were made available to a much wider audience when everyone in the UK was granted access to the site. At the same time, the BBC Academy reached agreement with Oxford University Press to sell subscriptions to the site around the world.

The number of users shot up as a result and now averages between 80,000 and 90,000 page views a month, with about 40,000 unique users.

What that means is that there are far more people using the site from outside the BBC than there are inside. They are individuals, other media organisations, and all sorts of media trainers.

But the content remains concentrated on an internal audience of BBC journalists, still a sizeable constituency of more than 8,000 around the world. It's great that others can benefit too, but the primary purpose of the site, as for the College of Journalism as a whole, remains to help BBC journalists to do their job better.

Those who use the site value it highly, but we still have a job to do in bringing it to the attention of more people, both within the organisation and beyond. There are still those who have only a vague awareness of the site, or who have visited once or twice, and have perhaps not been able to find what they were looking for and abandoned the search.

To address these problems we are now redesigning and relaunching the site. The plan is to make it brighter and more attractive, easier to find your way around, and more dynamic and responsive to events. New content will be offered in different ways: fewer of the longer films; more short, easily digestible chunks which give users greater flexibility in how they use it.

Whether or not we succeed, you'll soon be able to judge for yourself. Come and visit - and let us know what you think.

Jonathan Baker is the head of the BBC College of Journalism.

The launch of the social network Google+ last year was only the company's first step against the unstoppable growth of Facebook. This week Google announced its next move - with something Facebook can't match.

Search, plus Your World (SPYW) integrates personal information into Google search results. So if I enter a search term into Google (if I've logged in), my results will be different from yours.

Google gives an example of one of its engineers searching for the name of his dog Chikoo. Now when I search for chikoo the top result is a Wikipedia entry referring to the Indian name for the sapodilla tree. But when the dog owner searches at the top of his results are thumbnail pictures of his mutt, beside a link to "50 personal results" - which are pictures and references he has shared with his friends and mentions they have made of Chikoo.

Here's how Google is promoting SPYW:

In a guest blog post, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, explains why he walked away from the social networking site:

A few weeks ago I killed my Facebook account.

Years of pithy status updates, inconsequential conversations with friends and acquaintances and personal photo albums were consigned to the dustbin.

Or at least once I had downloaded an archive of my exploits from Facebook's servers first.

To be honest, I've been thinking of leaving Facebook for quite some time.

I've become increasingly uncomfortable with Facebook's morphing privacy settings and, as I'm someone who speaks and blogs about the importance of online privacy and security, it felt incongruous to use a service which I didn't feel confident I could appropriately manage.

In a nutshell, if I don't think that I can get my head around how to protect my personal information and updates on Facebook then - as someone who advises others on how to best remain private - I should quit.

As Facebook approaches 1 billion users, cyber criminals are finding it more attractive than ever to bombard the social network's users with malware attacks, phishing campaigns, rogue applications, survey scams, and attempts to steal identities. But none of these were a good enough reason for me to up sticks and leave.

What worried me was the very credible risk that Facebook would once again tweak its privacy settings one morning, or choose to roll out a feature without my permission that would make some of my personal information visible to others. I don't mind that if I have a choice, but there has been a long history of Facebook steadily eroding its members' privacy without asking first.

Facebook's attitude has nearly always been that you should 'opt out' of having your information shared rather than require users to 'opt in'.

As someone who makes a living describing how computer users can be safer online, it simply doesn't make any sense for me to risk having my reputation trampled over by Mark Zuckerberg's very different view on how people wish to maintain privacy.

When I signed up for Facebook a few years ago, it was a very different beast than it is today. The site has changed; its attitude to privacy and what it shares about you by default is different. It's all too easy to have created an account in the past and find - without your knowledge - that the rules have changed today.

Maybe I trusted Facebook then. But a series of goof-ups it has made alongside controversial features it opted me into without my permission means I don't trust it any longer.

The straw that broke the camel's back was not that I was fed up with invites to play FarmVille, or being poked by half-forgotten people I went to school with, or seeing unflattering pictures other folks had taken of me dancing at parties.

No, the thing which convinced me to leave Facebook once and for all was its new Timeline feature. 

The timeline, Facebook's new way of representing your past posts, makes it easier than ever before to see just how much information you have shared with Facebook.

And it scared me. It scared me because I haven't actually been much of a Facebook user in the past four years. I'd ignored my own advice to never post anything on Facebook which I wouldn't feel comfortable with my mother-in-law or boss seeing, or broadcasting through a loudspeaker in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.

And I'm not alone. A survey of more than 4,000 people conducted when the Timeline was first announced discovered that over 50% said they were worried by it. A further 32% said they weren't sure why they were on Facebook at all anymore!

Yes, I had locked down my Facebook privacy settings to the 'nth' degree, but it's a full-time job trying to get your head around that labyrinth of options - and I'm all too aware that Facebook has made mistakes in the past, meaning that information you told it to keep private was available for anybody to see.

Quitting Facebook isn't for everyone.

Some people view the site like an embarrassing addiction - they want to give it up but feel they can't because so many of their friends are up there and they feel they will miss out if they leave. I can sympathise with that position.

Others still are much more laid-back about their personal privacy and security - and don't seem concerned about the information they are sharing on the site and the potential for abuse. This might be a symptom of the 'Oprah' generation - where social networkers feel no embarrassment about what others may read about them or photographs that may be shared - rather like a celebrity overcoming a drug addiction might have no shame about laying on the table their past misdemeanours.

I accept that my position is unusual. I'm quoted in the media discussing social media security, so I have a very good reason for not wanting a privacy screw-up to reflect badly on me.

But if you do also decide that you don't want to be on Facebook - because you're concerned about the time you're wasting on the site, or being spammed by games and rogue apps, or how the site might be making money out of the information you share - then be sure to permanently delete your account rather than deactivate it.

Facebook desperately wants to hold onto your data, as it allows it to target advertising towards you. So it strongly pushes anyone who says they want to leave the site towards deactivating their account rather than deleting it.

Deactivation puts your account on ice, making it invisible to the outside world. But if you ever log back into Facebook it will be revived in a heartbeat, with all your friend connections, photos and status updates back as if you were never away.

The correct way to zap your Facebook account is to request its permanent deletion (you can do this via a form hidden away on Facebook's site).

Even then, it's not quite over. Facebook gives you 14 days of 'grace' to reconsider your decision. During that time you must not log into Facebook, or 'Like' any pages, or sign up to any third-party sites using your Facebook credentials.

If you do, your Facebook account will be revived once more and it will not be deleted.

Facebook is a phenomenon and it would be a brave - and perhaps foolish - man who said it was going to go away anytime soon. But it needs to take greater care of its user community and reassure it that privacy and security are part of its DNA if it wants to present itself as a mature network.

Me? I'm not planning to return. I feel that I've thrown the dice and played Russian roulette with my personal information for long enough. I find Twitter a much more useful environment for sharing information and having meaningful, timely discussions with my peers, anyhow.

Obviously, my opinions and decision regarding my FB account are my own - rather than endorsed by all Sophos employees!

Graham Cluley, @gcluley, is a senior technology consultant at Sophos. He blogs at http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com. 

On 2.30pm at Tuesday 3 January, I sent out my last Stephen Lawrence trial tweet:

"#stephenlawrence jury coming in - could verdict be imminent? - watch #BBCNewschannel."

Then the tables turned - the Twitter stream shifting from a tool to a source as I relied on it for hours of live commentary.

Within seconds of the jury foreman announcing that Gary Dobson and David Norris were guilty of murder, and the judge telling them they were to be "detained at Her Majesty's pleasure", we used Twitter to deliver the story, the reaction, the colour, and the quotes.

But in true BBC fashion I want to put that bold statement into context. These were the key factors:

- I had sat through almost the entire trial. I had heard the barristers making their detailed cases for prosecution and defence. I had seen the scientific photographs of minute specks of forensic evidence. I had studied the timeline of the handling of forensic exhibits over the best part of two decades. Above all, because the BBC had assigned me to the case for the full seven weeks, I had the ability to put tweets and texts into context for the viewers.

Trying to deliver breaking news via Twitter from a standing start would be an entirely different - and daunting - proposition. 

- Twitter was not the only source, but it was my primary source of breaking news. When we ran from the building after learning that the verdict was imminent, we began our broadcast using the tried-and-tested technique of having our court producer Jeremy Britton texting from the courtroom. He was the man trusted to tell us that the jury had verdicts to give, that it was a double verdict on both Dobson and Norris, and that the judge had lifted his reporting restrictions straight afterwards. 

- It mattered immensely which Twitter accounts we followed. Perhaps that's too obvious to state: of course it's a basic rule of journalism to select the most credible sources.

We relied above all on the BBC's Matt Prodger @mattprodger (above) and Dominic Casciani @BBCDomC (below). Like me, they'd been sitting in court throughout the weeks of evidence and argument, and knew the case inside out. I was able to have a brief chat with both of them on the morning of the sentencing, so they knew I'd be quoting them directly. They knew I was looking for the drama of the occasion. And they provided a stellar news service in those highly charged minutes when the murder verdicts were delivered, and the following day when the sentences were handed down.

BBC producer Sally Graham was the woman with the smartphone on the scene - handing me her handset as I spoke to camera. She was filtering for me, judging which tweets were 'ours' (from BBC sources) and which tweets from other sources - like Sandra Laville, @sandralaville, from the Guardian - could be quoted to give our viewers powerful extra details.

And when Sally passed me the phone I then chose whether to broadcast what I saw. A few tweets gave me information which I thought might disrupt the flow of the moment, and were better mentally filed away.

And, again, I can't stress enough that it mattered that the BBC had assigned me to the case as a whole, rather than just sent me to break the news on verdict day.

Reader Steve Wheeler left this comment on my blog: "I think that Twitter is no longer optional when it comes to breaking news, I think all that is in doubt is how much you and your colleagues will embrace it."

I agree that for journalists gathering news it's not optional. It's essential. And for those breaking news dramas of the verdicts and the sentences, my use of Twitter certainly got a lot of reaction.

Reader Margherita Douglas sent this to the blog: "I thought it was a gripping way to show the story unfolding, I was watching/listening you as I read tweets from various other journalists at the same time and felt like I almost could have been in that court room."

This tweet came from S McGivern @SMG614 when I asked for comments for this article: "You created a good sense of narrative and the twitter news source was quicker than actual News."

Neil Primrose sent me this delightful feedback from @Neil_in_Norfolk: "You've done an astonishing job making something hugely complex & harrowing human & manageable.Incisive skilled live journalism."

And I can't resist this one from Graham Spencer, @hermanworm: "I've tried to convince a sceptical friend of the point of Twitter. Will use your fantastic work this week as shining example."

But how about the wider BBC audience? For the majority, is this all a lot of fuss over very little? How many British news consumers use Twitter? What do those who don't feel about seeing us quote from tweets: appreciative, bemused or annoyed? 

And, as for court reporting, will we look back on the buzz about Twitter as hopelessly old-fashioned just as soon as we get the cameras in?

Just as I was writing this paragraph, a tweet popped up from Rebecca S in Brighton, @scandals66: "Won't live cameras will be in court soon? Surely, tis a transient, if gripping, form of justice reporting."

I wonder what you think?

Philippa Thomas is a BBC News correspondent and tweets @PhilippaNews. This is the second part of her reflections on covering the trial.

The first part discussed the earlier parts of the trial and the innovation of Twitter in court reporting.

Philippa has also written about her Twitter coverage of the trial on the BBC News site.

If you were in any doubt about the increasing influence of Facebook, two things caught my eye this week, both of which demonstrated the impact of the social network.

In the US, Zynga, the maker of the Facebook-based hit game Farmville among many others, this week sold 14% of its shares, valuing the company at $7 billion. Markets clearly still value companies which make things, even if in this instance the 'goods' are virtual.

Facebook's own IPO, widely predicted to be issued at some point in 2012, will surely see the social network valued at a much higher figure.

And the network's dominance of the social sphere was clearly reflected in Ofcom's sixth International Communications Market report, a weighty tome which compared the global communications market across 17 countries. It found that in the past year 'Facebook' was the most searched for term on Google in ten out of 17 countries, including Italy, Spain and the US. It was also the fourth-most searched for term in India and Brazil, confirming that Facebook isn't just a phenomenon of the US and Europe.

Of course other social networks do exist - and are popular: Stayfriends with the second largest social network in Germany, for example, and Copains d'Avant, the third-most popular in France. 

Of all the countries surveyed, Top of the (social networking) Pops is Italy, where 91% of internet users having visited these sites online. Twenty-four per cent of them do so more than five times a day. Moreover, the average Italian also has more friends online (216) than the average user in the UK (168), US (198) or France (108). It was also the country where the highest number of internet users claimed to read news online (78%).

The impact of this for news outlets and journalists isn't just that social networks are where the eyeballs are. They're also affecting how we consume traditional media, with some audiences consuming less 'heritage' media as a result.

Source: Ofcom consumer research, October 2011.

Consumers are also using social networking sites to discover breaking news, with a third (35%) of UK consumers saying they do this, alongside nearly half of French (45%) and those highly socially networked Italians (47%).

As Facebook rolls out its Timeline service, and other developments designed to make the network stickier still, media outlets will have to respond to the challenge by somehow embracing the power of social networks.

Yahoo! has just announced it is rolling out its Yahoo! Activity news tool, to the UK and Europe, making story sharing easier; while traditional media players like The Washington Post have introduced their own Facebook app so users can read their content entirely within Facebook itself.

In March 2011, the hyper-local website Rockville Central, a Maryland-based blog, went one further by becoming Facebook-only, noting: "Facebook is where people, by and large, have decided to go for their first-stop online community activities. Which begs the question: Why have a separate site, and try to drag people away from Facebook? Why not go where they are?"

As the BBC's recent Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook programme showed, a wide range of businesses have been developed off the back of the network's success. And while Zynga's flotation is perhaps the most high profile, efforts such as Rockville Central show that this impact can be felt right down to a hyper-local level.

For innovation lovers, it looks like Facebook will continue to be 'one to watch' in 2012.

Damian Radcliffe is manager, nations and communities, at Ofcom. He is writing here in a personal capacity.

Postgraduate Student Journalism Innovation Award

The BBC College of Journalism is launching its first award this month, championing the most innovative postgraduate students at the UK's journalism schools. 

The world of journalism is undergoing a period of radical change. New technology, social media, data analysis and the way in which the mainstream media engage with their audiences, and the wider community, is having a profound effect on the way journalists operate. 

Some of the most creative material is coming out of the UK's journalism schools and we want to reward that with the Postgraduate Student Journalism Innovation Award. We're looking for the most talented of the next generation of journalism students who are using genuinely new ways of working.

The criteria are deliberately broad, designed to encourage students to produce a piece of fantastic original journalism using the very latest skills and techniques. 

This could mean a visionary form of crowdsourced newsgathering, excellent multimedia and multiplatform working, infographics, data analysis, or a really clever use of social media. In short, anything that illustrates journalistic ingenuity.  

As well as being innovative, each piece must demonstrate first-class public interest journalism. At the heart of each piece of work we want to see reporting that embraces the truest form of journalism, the fourth estate: holding power to account and exposing wrong-doing at all levels. The latest advances in journalism need to keep this at their very core.  

The competition is open to all postgraduate journalism students in the UK. It's officially launched this December with the closing date for entries being the end of April.

The award will be judged by a panel of senior media industry figures and presented at a major BBC College of Journalism conference at the BBC's new home at MediaCityUK in Salford. The presentation will take place in front of some of the key movers and shakers in UK journalism: the event represents a fantastic opportunity to network and showcase your work.

The winner and shortlisted candidates will have their work shown on both the College of Journalism and BBC Academy websites. The overall winner will also receive a unique prize that will no doubt give their career a well deserved boost. 

We believe this is a great opportunity for us to work more closely with the UK's journalism schools and give students the chance to engage with the BBC.

Find more details on how to enter. 

If you have any queries, please contact David Hayward, Journalism Programme, BBC College of Journalism: david.hayward@bbc.co.uk.