Good morning. Here are 10 media stories.
- Net neutrality protesters reportedly arrested at Google HQ: Valleywag’s Nitasha Tiku and TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas report that members of a group called Occupy Google were arrested outside Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters early this morning. (Valleywag; TechCrunch)
- Source spot: New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan draws a line between “serious and valid use of confidentiality” and anonymity granted for sources relaying “what is often, in essence, officially approved government communication, or for promoting their own political agenda.” (NYT)
- Phone-hacking stories you might actually want to read: The criminal case against several former News Corp employees “is not the final word on whether either editor, News Corp., or much of the British tabloid press has betrayed the principles of journalism,” Ken Auletta writes. “Ethical failures may not merit a jail term; they do merit a spotlight.” (The New Yorker) || A superb explainer about the trial by Patrick Smith and Alan White. (BuzzFeed) || No verdict in misconduct charges for former News of the World Editor Andy Coulson (Digital Spy)
- Peter Hirschberg resigns from Bloomberg News: “I am especially proud of the work we did in lifting the veil on the vast wealth accumulated by the families of China’s ruling elite,” he tells Chris Roush (Talking Biz News)
- No conflict: New York Times intern Teddy Schleifer has previously been a speechwriting intern for Delaware Gov. Jack Martell and on the 2012 Obama campaign. “We are confident that his work for us is solid, accurate and fair, and that we can avoid any potential conflicts of interest,” Times standards editor Philip Corbett tells Paul Farhi. (The Washington Post)
- Disappointing, deflating, and awful: About 70 percent of the people who answered Poynter’s poll are pro-Oxford comma. (Poynter) Those people are mistaken, for reasons I explained in a series of tweets.
- When corrections aren’t enough: Baynard Woods suggests a “Kick-the-Can firing squad” for egregious errors. (Baltimore City Paper)
- Dying for access: A New Orleans funeral home was swamped with calls after a New York Times story on its “non-traditional” funerals, in which loved ones are posed as they might have been in life (sitting behind a table with smokes and drinks, for example). “People have been calling about doing reality shows, documentaries, movies,” Lyelle Bellard tells Jed Lipinski. (Nola.com/The Times-Picayune)
- Georgia State administrators shouldn’t worry that they might be sued if they accept a counterproposal from alumni who want to keep WRAS under student control instead of following through on an agreement to let Georgia Public Broadcasting get most of its airtime, Adam Goldstein writes. That would amount to them suing themselves, an affront to “principles of judicial economy and basic sanity.” (Student Press Law Center)
- “Curiosity gap” headlines rarely pay off: @SavedYouAClick founder Jake Beckman says he makes “a point not to do this with articles that are long-form and require a nuanced response or point-of-view to really fill the reader in, because I understand that oversimplifying things is not for every story. But I think that a large part of the stories that are tweeted today, they’re very lightweight content that could have been answered in the original tweet and if the readers were interested, they would have clicked through.” (Capital)
Suggestions? Criticisms? Would like me to send you this roundup each morning? Please email me: abeaujon@poynter.org.
