Sarah Houghton-Jan reports in an article a few days ago that a new PEW report shows the growing tendency of people to get news from the Web. She suggests that librarians should jump on this, and offer our skills in filtering, teaching finding-skills, and creating tutorials. I like Sarah’s idea, and take it a step further — As Sarah mentions, one of the findings of the PEW report is that mobile devices are providing a growing portion of online news, so I suggest that an area of news curation that especially needs librarians’ skills is mobile news — I’ve been watching for news sources that have mobile apps or mobile-friendly sites, and I find that they vary a lot in coverage and quality — They’re in great need of the curatorial skills of librarians!

Sites that I like (with screenshots below) are: New York Times,  AP-News, The Guardian, The (London) Times, and Reuters. I especially look for good pictures. The best of the sites listed here for pictures is AP-News — Note that the bottom left screenshot below is a report of the recent earthquake in Chile, with an AP-News gallery.

For news-related pictures, I’ve found that the best sites are not traditional news sites, like the ones listed here, but other, blog-like sites — As I discussed in an earlier article on Haiti earthquake coverage, great pictures for that (and for the Chile earthquake as well as other news subjects) are at The Big Picture/Boston.com and the Hyderabad News WordPress site.

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter @ericrumseytemp