What the blogs say: stormporn, word clouds, investors and glass eyes

Remember Hurricane Irene?

Its US television coverage, said Jeff Jarvis, illustrated "the predictable and numbing repetition, alarmism and idiocy that is TV". It was "laughable" to see "crews everywhere, all shooting the same wind and water, yet saying nothing new".

Online media was not exactly covered in glory either as Irene blew: Twitter's popular hashtag #stormporn promised the chance to watch destruction from behind the safety of a laptop (and behind the safety of irony too).

Gawker went for the voyeuristic jugular with a collection of TV clips called, irresistibly, The Ten Best Videos of Reporters Being Blown Away By Hurricanes.

Irene, like snow in Britain, offered great opportunities for interaction between big media and its audience. But, where a few years ago that meant asking people to send in their pictures or videos for broadcast, today everyone is their own broadcaster. So what's left for big media to do?

According to Jarvis, proper reporting of the story would have meant "finding out what government is not doing - see Katrina".

But there are also new-fangled things to do. Facebook and Journalists collected examples of media organisations using Facebook to crowdsource stories.

Some were simple, but apparently effective: Associated Press asked people for their memories of 9/11 on Facebook, got 100 responses, and wrote a story. Others were more unusual: MSNBC asked its Facebook fans to help it translate a blog into Japanese. And it processed its readers' contributions to the page into a word cloud to reveal a picture of their collective interests.

Back in the UK, a new generation of journalists is trying to work out how to balance a career (or paid work at least) between big media institutions - the ones sending crews to film wind and water - and the heady future of creating new vehicles for content using new, unproven business models.

After a year documenting their lives on Wannabe Hacks, the five young writers are moving on, to be replaced by five others as a new academic year begins. One, Ben Whitelaw, leaves with a plea for venture capitalists to think of journalistic enterprises like tech start-ups:

"For all the hype about entrepreneurial journalism, there's very little infrastructure in place to make a young journalist think it was a genuine career option, pending a good idea obviously.

To extend that argument a little further, what is stopping venture capitalists or angel investors investing in the journalism? Is there really no-one out there willing to invest what is tuppence in VC terms in media start-ups?"

For a true flavour of the journalistic world that's being left behind, look no further than Roy Greenslade's affectionate obituary of Fleet Street legend Mike Terry, who died this week aged 86. 

Greenslade worked with Terry on The Sun and says he was "an oasis of sanity who always offered good counsel and friendship".

But it was Terry's legendary drinking that provides the colour:

"An amiable and always entertaining drunk, one of his favourite pub tricks was to put his glass eye in someone else's pint of beer.

His long-suffering office driver once sent a memo to management to complain that, although it might be his duty to clean the car after the effects of Terry's drinking and to help him up the garden path at 4am in the morning, he did not think it should be his responsibility to then search for his glass eye."

What would Mike Terry have made of word clouds? Perhaps this - made from the 1,241 words of feedback this blog has received from its readers in the past week - might have reminded him of how the galleys of The Sun looked when he returned to the office after dropping his eye into another colleague's pint: