Seven characteristics defining online news formats:Towards a typology of online news and live blogs

Whilst live blogs have become an established part of the news media ecology, corresponding research is still in its infancy, especially that which examines the crucial question of sourcing practices. In this article we address some of the gaps in previous research by conducting a large comparative sourcing analysis of three UK news organisations - BBC News, the Guardian, and the Telegraph - that all regularly publish live blogs. We analyse sourcing practices across three different genres of live blogging and corresponding online news articles, through a comparative analysis of events broadly categorised as crisis, politics, and sport. Our findings suggest that there are some aspects of sourcing practices that are distinct to live blogs, such as directly embedding social media. However, when it comes to polyvocality (the diversity of who gets to speak), genre-specific journalism norms seem to account for more than the affordances of the platform itself and only in sport live blogs are demotic voices habitually included. Based on these findings we develop a typology of live blogging and online news articles, that documents the nuances in sourcing patterns across different news formats and genres, and provide a theoretical basis for future research in this field

RNAmmer: consistent and rapid annotation of ribosomal RNA genes

The publication of a complete genome sequence is usually accompanied by annotations of its genes. In contrast to protein coding genes, genes for ribosomal RNA (rRNA) are often poorly or inconsistently annotated. This makes comparative studies based on rRNA genes difficult. We have therefore created computational predictors for the major rRNA species from all kingdoms of life and compiled them into a program called RNAmmer. The program uses hidden Markov models trained on data from the 5S ribosomal RNA database and the European ribosomal RNA database project. A pre-screening step makes the method fast with little loss of sensitivity, enabling the analysis of a complete bacterial genome in less than a minute. Results from running RNAmmer on a large set of genomes indicate that the location of rRNAs can be predicted with a very high level of accuracy. Novel, unannotated rRNAs are also predicted in many genomes. The software as well as the genome analysis results are available at the CBS web server