Denise Graveline has a refreshing take on news that the presidential campaigns insist on reviewing their quotes. She shoots down the rationale: "'Denise, don't you find that, 99.9 percent of the time, the reporter has misquoted the expert being interviewed?' No, that's not what I find at all. What I find is that you said something you weren't supposed to say, you were quoted accurately, and now you want to blame the reporter." More from Poynter.
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A writer for Britain's The Guardian appears ready to award that title to ProPublica, barely four years after the non-profit newsroom began life. Frédéric Filloux writes, "Not only did ProPublica put itself at the forefront of the public interest, high quality, digitally boosted, modern journalism, but it also created a sustainable way to support it." Filloux intersperses his comments with quotes from Paul Steiger, ProPublica's editor-in-chief, CEO and president.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize was only the latest from the Great Aggregator, Michael Shapiro writes in Columbia Journalism Review. Tracing its birth to a lunch in 2003, Shapiro explains how Arianna Huffington's web site managed to "surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate."
A recent Pew study on the habits of local news consumers had both good and bad things to say about the future of local journalism. Almost three-quarters of adults say they are avid followers of local news and rely mainly on their local newspapers, the study reported. But Steve Myers at the Poynter Institute finds a darker message: "Glass half empty: 72 percent of local news junkies say they wouldn’t pay for online access to their newspaper."
If you're employed, what you write is generally your employer's property. But the lines are blurry in the era of social media, Rob Pegoraro reports on DiscoveryNews. A site called PhoneDog Media "is suing journalist Noah Kravitz for $340,000 — that's $2.50 per Twitter follower times 17,000 followers times eight months — for renaming the company-branded @Phonedog_Noah account he had set up to the more personal @NoahKravitz after his departure from the firm."
In New York City, having media badges didn't protect reporters from being treated just about as roughly as Occupy Wall Street protesters, Robert Niles points out in the Online Journalism Review. "What's the point of having that credential … if it's not going to keep you from getting hit, gassed or hauled off to jail with the rest of the crowd at a protest you're covering?" Niles asks. Maybe, he says, it's time to rethink the practice.
NASW has joined five other journalism groups in protesting the Obama Administration's decision to restrict access to a medical database. The Public Use File of the National Practitioner Data Bank was taken down, officials said, because they believed it was used to identify physicians inappropriately. The journalism groups asked 10 lawmakers to "put patient safety ahead of physician privacy concerns." Use the "read more" link to see the letter and supporting documents.
Despite some worrisome anecdotal evidence, members of NASW and three other journalism groups generally give the Obama Administration higher marks than the Bush Administration on transparency and information access, the Columbia Journalism Review reports. Yet one-third of respondents said Obama is still doing a poor job on those issues, Curtis Brainard writes: "His administration is clearly trying, just not quite as hard as he suggested it would."
It's not Facebook or Twitter, it's Matt Drudge, says the Pew Research Center. More than a decade after breaking the Lewinsky scandal, Drudge's bare-bones page pushes more traffic to major news web sites than either social media giant. A Washington Post spokeswoman begs to differ, however. More from David Carr, editorsweblog.org, and Romenesko.
Pulitzer winners are now posted. Honorees of particular interest to science writers include the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for explanatory reporting, and finalists in the public service, investigative reporting, and local reporting categories.