District Judge James Richardson forbade a (Carroll) Daily Times Herald reporter from taking notes at a vehicular homicide trial Tuesday in Audubon, a rare courtroom rule that some say is unconstitutional. Richardson said a reporter's scrawls could "influence the jury in that they might think something is important if they see me writing," reporter Jared Raney said.
In a Q&A, The Content Strategist spoke with Elizabeth Spiers, former editor of The New York Observer, who helped launch Gawker and Flavorwire and now consults with early-stage startups, about how to create strong content and navigate grey areas in the overlap of journalism and brand writing.
Praise and happy memories are pouring out for John Richard "Dick" Irwin, a "tough, accurate veteran police reporter with a heart of gold whose signature Police Blotter became required reading for both crime aficionados and the just plain curious," the Sun reports. Irwin, a Guild member until his retirement in 2010, died Wednesday of complications from diabetes.
Denver TV station KDVR, a Fox affiliate, broadcast a story Saturday that claimed an Italian shotgun-company executive “was taken in for questioning by law enforcement” after a taxi driver mistook him for a terrorist. KDVR didn’t speak to the executive, Daniele Perazzi, but to his “U.S. attorney,” In fact, Daniele Perazzi died in 2012. The “incident is devoid of any foundation and the news is completely fabricated,” the company said in a statement. The story was also reported by Examiner.com
The Justice Department's investigation and surveillance of the Associated Press and Fox News have led to perhaps the most sustained wave of criticism for the Obama administration's media policies since the president took office, Huffington Post reports in a wrap of criticism of the White House. Art: Huffington Post screen shot, Wednesday afternoon.
With so many tragedies to report in such a short period of time — Newtown, the Boston bombings, Hurricane Sandy, the deadly explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant and others — there seems to be a desire to move straight from the tragic to the silver lining, writes Jane McManus. "A news organization isn’t there to chew your meals for you. Even in difficult reporting conditions like these, it’s perfectly appropriate to let the facts lead the story and allow survivors their own narrative. However messy the stitching."
The Department of Justice has been criticized for not following its own guidelines when it seized telephone records from the Associated Press without notice, but other government bodies don’t even have such guidelines. Millman writes, "My first-hand experience of this came when agents of the Secret Service appeared at my door in 1991. I was a freelance journalist at the time, and had written a story about a tax issue for a now-defunct magazine called 'Corporate Finance.' Two agents in suits knocked on my back door one autumn day as the children were sitting down to lunch, came in and urged me to identify my sources for the story, in which I had cited an Internal Revenue Service memo. When I refused to identify anyone, the agents told me I could wind up spending five years in prison. I didn’t know at the time that they already had a record of every phone call I had made."
Sue Ogrocki, an Associated Press photographer in Oklahoma and a Guild member, was at Plaza Towers Elementary School on Monday as children were rescued."Parents and neighborhood volunteers stood in a line and passed the rescued children from one set of arms to another, carrying them out of harm's way," she wrote on a blog. "Adults carried the children through a field littered with shredded pieces of wood, cinder block and insulation to a triage center in a parking lot. They worked quickly and quietly so rescuers could try to hear voices of children trapped beneath the rubble." Art: Screen grab from Tulsa World showing one of Ogrocki's photos.
A collection of front pages from Oklahoma newspapers in the aftermath of Monday's deadly tornado. Berry Tramel’s front page story in The Oklahoman compared the tragedy to a tornado that struck Moore on May 3, 1999: “The monster returned,” his piece begins.
The Justice Department’s secret subpoena for AP phone records included the seizure of records for five reporters' cellphones and three home phones as well as two fax lines, a lawyer for the news organization told NBC News on Monday.
The Justice Department's investigation and surveillance of the Associated Press and Fox News have led to perhaps the most sustained wave of criticism for the Obama administration's media policies since the president took office, Huffington Post reports in a wrap of criticism of the White House. Art: Huffington Post screen shot, Wednesday afternoon.