Let’s see, my online news wishlist might include … an ability to simultaneously track live streams of TV channels. For breaking news, I generally have three or four video live streams going at once. This morning it was AJ English, AJ Arabic and Libya TV. I’d like to be able to set it up so I could see all three feeds in the same window.

Live streams of various sorts are vital to the way I track the news and the issue of syncing different news sources is part of what I work on doing as a news blogger. The broader my ability to track multiple sources at once, the better off I am. That’s why I love live blogs like the ones the Guardian runs so beautifully (also places like the BBC, Al Jazeera, and Reuters) because they typically combine everything from original reports, to photographs, tweets, quotes and video footage. I’d like to be able to track Twitter as I watch Al Jazeera. Which technically can sort of be accomplished by downloading the Livestation computer application, but that isn’t very fast, clean or reliable at this point.

Another thing that I see come up often is the issue of statistics in reporting, particularly with body counts. Often, when there’s a suicide bombing in, say, Peshawar (I’m making this up), Al Jazeera will report one set of figures about how many dead and wounded and how many attackers. The NYT will post something completely different. There isn’t a specific tool on my wishlist to respond to this, necessarily, but it’s a problem. Sometimes it’s a function of the time at which the stories were filed, but not always, and I’d like to be better able to juggle and compare the information presented to me to get the most likely number.

I guess what it comes down to for me is that anything that allows me to pair veracity with speed is good in my book. I want any tool that allows me to see more and to verify more and compare more things. Also anything that allows me to widen the field of ways in which I present my material (photos, text and video) is great.