Category Archives: In the News

As a newspaper lover, my heart bleeds again. After 150 years of business, The Rocky Mountain News published for the last time today. Some of the staffers shared their thoughts with Columbia Journalism Review.

Here’s a cautionary tale for all journalism students: A reporter/producer inserts some rude language into a broadcast by Fox News anchor John Gibson as a prank. The broadcast is mistakenly posted as legitimate by the Huffington Post. The broadcast goes viral on You Tube and the reporter/producer gets fired. LINK.

National Press Photographers Association Best of TV results are out. See the results at Poynter.org. Here’s the winner of the Deadline Spot News Editing award:

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The New York Post apologized in an editorial for the political cartoon it ran that critics said showed Obama as a chimpanzee. LINK. The cartoon combined two news stories that were big last week: President Obama’s financial stimulus package and a chimpanzee who was shot and killed by police after it attacked a woman, severely mauling her face. LINK.The Post has been in this business long enough to know what the reaction would be to a depiction of Obama as a chimpanzee, even if the reference was an oblique one. So the paper either ran it with the intention of being racist. Or they didn’t believe it was racist and knew that some people might think it was, but ran it anyway. So why then apologize? My students had a theory: for the publicity.

Politico sotory about a number of reporters leaving to go work for Obama LINK.

After a firestorm of protest about its new Terms of Use policy, Facebook announces it will go back to its old policy LINK.

The New York Times tops the Neiman Lab’s list of top 15 newspaper websites for 2008 LINK.

When journalism professors tell their students not to pay for stories it’s for good reason. Money makes people lie. Here is a case in point. The British tabloids have been all over a story about a 13-year-old boy who fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl. Now, it turns out the 13-year-old may not have been the father after all. But he stuck with the story for the cash LINK.

Be warned: Facebook has changed it’s terms of service. Whatever you post is now theirs LINK.

A great tutorial about blogging from Common Craft.. 

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Abraham Lincoln

Originally uploaded by George Eastman House

Check out the free Library of Congress pictures on Flickr.

The Phoenix New Times was forced to run a retraction for its cover story about the NBA imposing a cap on the number of tattoos players can have. They based the story on information they learned in a BLOG! LINK.

Alex Rodriguez is due for training in Tampa on Tuesday and expected to face the media for the first time since he admitted using performance-enhancing drugs LINK.

This just in from my new friend Fara Taye Warner: one show out of an occasional series on the future of newspapers LINK.