It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.

Google Wave (Google Wave) may seem familiar to older users of the Internet, who have been using the parts that make up the whole of the platform for years. Wave, however, brings those pieces together cohesively to allow users to share photos, embed videos, and converge other Google (Google) applications such as Google Maps (Google Maps) and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content on the fly. Here are four ways that newsrooms are using Wave.