But the biggest social media revelation to journalists came in the form of 140 characters. The social site, But personalized news seems to be picking up more slowly than social media. For one thing, Internet users are used to getting the information they seek from many Web pages and may not yet be ready to create their own pages. Secondly, search engines still rule, meaning that traffic to most news sites continues to come through Google, its competitors and their various news and alerts functions. So a customizable homepage like the BBC created, which could ultimately prove a competitor to search engines, remains to become a habit of the general Internet public.  

Personalized news and social media are just two examples of all of the innovation that is occurring in digital media. As technologies continue to rapidly develop, how are journalists and publishers going to keep up? Is it worth learning to use all of these tools if six months down the line they prove to be a fad? Are these technologies hurting or helping newsrooms gather and report news?

Chances are, in 2009 journalists everywhere will continue to experiment with the latest digital fads, and smart newsrooms will set aside R&D funds to play around with new ideas. Who knows? Despite predictions that 2009 will be a difficult year for newspapers, with a lot of hard work, calculated risk and a bit of luck, the industry could find the online golden egg that it has been seeking.

PROLIFERATION OF ONLINE-ONLY NEWS SITES
Perhaps filling in for the he relatively low overhead costs of launching an online-based site combined with the ease of aggregating content and news commentary means that this trend will surely continue in 2009. But there is one problem with the sites mentioned above. Aggregation and commentary can only go so far: in an online environment, what happens to the investigative journalism that newspapers have provided for the past two centuries?

NOT-FOR-PROFIT JOURNALISM
Investigative journalism is expensive to produce. Money-wise, it has always been a loss-leader for newspapers. But with modern-day information ubiquity, investigative journalism is just a loss. Whereas once newspapers could claim ownership of a groundbreaking piece and sell papers and advertising around it, now readers are often unaware of the original source of the story they are reading on the Web. So what is going to happen to the type of watchdogging we need for democracy?

Several non-profit start-ups have begun to answer that question. In late 2007, former newspaper editor, Joel Kramer, took his print expertise and moved it online with the launch of the non-profit The Voice of San Diego, and other similar sites around the US, are making a name for themselves as "serious, original reporting by professional journalists," with the New York Times declaring the sites "stand out" amongst Internet news sites. Crowdsourcing site OfftheBus, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the non-profit New