Go and find something out

Amid collapsing banks, yo-yoing share prices and widespread insecurity it is natural to look for a culprit. The difficult bit is choosing the villain. Did the banks - particularly the de-mutualised building societies - completely lose touch with reality in their hunger to expand market share? Should their senior executives shoulder all the blame, or is there such a thing as political responsibility?

Iceland: which is worse, Croydon or Coventry?

You would have thought Iceland's woes were already bad enough. With the krona plunging more than 30 per cent in value in one day, its main banks teetering on the brink of disaster and residents of the once-lauded ‘Arctic Tiger' experiencing one of the worst ‘morning after the night befores' imaginable, they are now faced with a terrible attack of identity crisis.

Centre for Journalism undergrads may remember that snippet from the Tom Cruise film Minority Report that I showed them in week one's first lecture. Cruise is a cop on the run from his own police force in the year 2054 and jumps on a tube train. The guy sitting opposite is reading a copy of USA Today, whose splash suddenly updates in front of his eyes to reveal the Cop On the Run story, complete with pictures of the fugitive...

During Welcome Week, we sent our first year students out with Canon HV30 video cameras and radio microphones to interview each other as an ice-breaking exercise. Today, they used that footage as a demonstration of how to digitise footage from the camera, make a simple cut in Premiere Elements, compress the output file and upload the resulting clip of a minute or so to the centreforjournalism site.

Two contrasting stories from France this morning draw attention to the state of flux in our industry and its still robust ability to challenge official orthodoxy.