• The Knight Citizen News Network has created a simplified legal guide for the online world: Top 10 Rules for Limiting Legal Risk. Much of the advice can be found elsewhere, but it’s a handy one-stop shop for such information. Via Len Witt.
• An adviser at the University of Denver’s Clarion student newspaper allegedly told a photo editor to change the color of the sky in a photograph from white to blue. Read more at SportsShooter.com. This violates the ethical standards of photojournalism, as expressed by the National Press Photographers Association:Accurate representation is the benchmark of our profession. We believe photojournalistic guidelines for fair and accurate reporting should be the criteria for judging what may be done electronically to a photograph. Altering the editorial content … is a breach of the ethical standards recognized by the NPPA.On the advising side, it’s a violation of the ethical standards of College Media Advisers, Inc. for the adviser to make editorial decisions, although UD is a private school, which complicates matters.
• Howard Owens offers up six roles for modern journalists: ethical, guide/filter, understanding/context, conversational leader, aggregator, and straight news. I’m a little skeptical about the ethical role, but that’s a conversation for another day. Go read the whole post and ask if you’re practicing these roles in your student newsroom. If not, why not? And, more importantly, what’s it going to take to get started doing so?
• Meranda Watling reminds me of a story I saw recently in the NY Times about web traffic spikes around lunchtime. She offers some suggestions for ways to increase traffic during that spike, but for college newspapers, there’s a different audience that doesn’t necessarily read online at that hour. For now, there are other problems. The traffic stats on College Publisher (at least the ones I’ve seen) don’t show hourly traffic. It’s worth looking into, however, to find when your traffic spikes are on your college news site and trying to figure out how to get more information out during those spikes.
• Mindy McAdams posts a quick guide to teaching audio in your newsroom or classroom. It’s a good guide, and very similar to something I’ve been using over the last two weeks in my advanced online journalism class at EIU. One difference, I’ve made the students produce four different audio packages: a collection of nat sounds (no human voices), an interview with a friend about an interesting situation that happened to them, an interview with a classmate (Mindy’s suggestion) that includes narration, and finally a real news story with narration, actualities and nat sounds. With each package, we’ve listened to all the submissions and provided feedback. The students then re-edited their audio based on the feedback. I also played these two videos - video 1 and video 2 - from Ira Glass (see below the fold for embedded videos), along with sample stories from This American Life and some NPR news clips. The results have been mostly encouraging.
• On the video front, Angela Grant and Robb Montgomery think video skills should be like typing. Boy, we’ve got a long way to go to get to that point.
• On the data front, EveryBlock, the new project by Adrian Holovaty, launched recently. Lucas Grindley has a nice roundup of reactions. Right now, EveryBlock is only available in three cities, but it could become yet another competitor in the local space that news media are fighting to keep.
• Paul Bradshaw breaks down the business models of online journalism with a nice, comprehensive post. For college media, there’s a bit of a lag in the economic trends, but some recent chatter on listservs suggests print advertising is starting to decline in that market as well.
• Megan Taylor discusses the “just do it” attitude as it relates to moving newsrooms forward into multimedia. Meta-discussions are fine and dandy, but at some point it’s beyond useless to keep trying to change minds with talk. Actions speak louder than words.
• Howard Owens discusses why newspaper web sites still struggle with audience participation, and looks to weblogs for guidance. On a related note, American Journalism Review notes that newspaper editors are starting to use blogs to listen to readers’ concerns, which is really old news, in a way. But how many college media outlets have an editor’s weblog? I mean one in which the editor actually posts content?
• Wired Journalist is a social network for people interested in online journalism. Over 700 members already. It’s built on the Ning social networking platform, which we used for our CICM social network. If you’re not a member, you might want to consider joining.

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