I imagine it like some high-tech dragon in the corner of the BBC Newsroom spewing fire as it reduces audience emails to megabytes of mush, but actually the BBC’s email cruncher is an attempt to deal with the tidal wave of citizen journalism swamping News Online. It’s still in development but it is a software programme that sifts through the words in an email and more importantly perhaps, the pictures. It gives the processors (or journalists as we used to call them) thumbnails of any image sent in, allowing faster filtering of all this user generated content. That was just one revelation from the latest POLIS Future of News seminars as a group of online journalists and bloggers came to the LSE to talk about what happens to journalism when it goes online. We will

have a full report as soon as my team of researchers have munched the data….