Three TV stations become one newsroom in Hawaii: In August, three Hawaii stations agreed to merge their news operations, and this week they debuted on air and online on HawaiiNewsNow.com. Raycom Media, which owns two of the stations, said the consolidation was necessary to prevent one or two stations from going under. Such dramatic (and painful) consolidation, I’m afraid, is far from over in the industry. (Via Broadcasting & Cable)

WMUR publishes book of user photos: On September 9, WMUR-TV asked everyone in the state of New Hampshire to grab their camera and take great shots of one day in the life of the state. More than 9,000 photos were submitted — more than enough to publish a coffee-table book with a companion DVD, just in time for the holidays. A very cool idea.

Bing scores with two big social deals: Bing is announcing today a deal to integrate real-time content from both Facebook and Twitter in search results. “The deal is a definite blow to the dominant search engine, since–for the first time–data will be available on Bing that is not on Google,” writes Kara Swisher. And by melding Facebook and Twitter together in an integrated search, Bing is creating new value and is becoming, in a way, the “cooler” search engine. Stay tuned: it’s a safe bet that Google will ink its own deals in the next few weeks.

Update: Google has done a Twitter deal, too

Google News adds ‘blog’ labels, but not for many newspapers: I noticed a few weeks ago that search results in Google News for our neighborhood news sites — like MyBallard.com above — now include a “blog” label. Nieman Journalism Lab did a little investigating on its own and found the use of the label is inconsistent. For example, most newspaper blogs — despite being called blogs — are not labeled as such in search results. “It’s hard not to wonder if Google sees this as a gesture to newspaper publishers who have occasionally complained that their content isn’t privileged over blogs,” Nieman Lab blogger Zachary Seward wrote.

According to Google, they added the label “after receiving feedback from some Google News users who told us they’d like to know whether a listed story is a blog item before they click on it to visit the publisher’s website.” But if you ask me, attempting to define what’s a blog and what isn’t is dangerous territory. I don’t mind being called a blog from time — we call ourselves a blog occasionally, too — but when Google distinguishes between independent blogs and established media blogs, then that’s a problem. And for some people (maybe not for you, but for many news consumers) the word “blog” carries enough negative connotation in the context of news to potentially devalue our search results. Just look at Google’s explanation.

Last year, Google initially refused to include My Ballard — which just won a national Online Journalism Award, by the way — into its Google News index. We pressed the issue and they changed their minds, adding our other Next Door Media sites as well, to which we are grateful. Now we hope they reconsider the blog label, or at the very least, make it fair.

New Flip camera includes Facebook upload feature: Flip Video, now owned by Cisco, has rolled out the second generation of its Flip MinoHD camera which “lets users shoot twice as much video, enjoy a bigger screen, and even share their stories directly to Facebook with the latest version of FlipShare,” explains Cisco’s Jonathan Kaplan. At Next Door Media, we carry Flip cameras all over the place — in our car, bags and laying around the house. Even though we own a higher-quality HD consumer camera with Final Cut Express, we use the Flips because of the quick turn-around time: plug in, quick edit, upload to YouTube in just a few minutes.