Media General explores sale of its newspapers

Media General
Just after the market closed Wednesday, Media General announced it is "exploring the potential sale of newspaper operations." The company, which owns 21 newspapers in five states, just two weeks ago got more time to ease a debt crunch it's been facing. It has also been reducing staff at The Tampa Tribune, where 165 positions were eliminated in December. Florida has been a particularly hard-hit market for the company, and the only one that did not report a profit in the third quarter of 2011. The Tampa Tribune, which some speculate will be one of the papers to be sold, competes with the Poynter-owned, recently-renamed Tampa Bay Times in the St. Petersburg-Tampa market. (more...)
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4 lessons from Columbia’s social media debate and related events

Social Media Week in New York ended last Friday night at Columbia University’s Journalism School, as social media editors, journalism students and social media aficionados continued conversations about guidelines and best practices that had occurred during a previous SocialRead more

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Federico on ESPN headline: ‘It was an awful editorial omission and it cost me my job’

TwitLonger | Poynter
Anthony Federico released an extended statement today in which he reiterates that he was not attempting a racist pun when he wrote "Chink in the Armor" as the headline for an ESPN story about the New York Knicks and Jeremy Lin. Federico says:
I wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of headlines in my five years at ESPN. There never was a problem with any of them and I was consistently praised as an employee – both personally and professionally. Two weeks prior to the incident I had my first column published on espnW.com. My career was taking off. Why would I throw that all away with a racist pun? This was an honest mistake.

It is also crucial that people know that the writer of the column had nothing to do with the headline. I wrote it and now I take responsibility for it. (more...)
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Newspaper carrier rescues stranded online journalist after 2 tow trucks refuse:

At the last minute of desperation I flagged down a guy in a minivan, hoping he would rescue me.

He did.

While tossing the daily news that we take for granted, in the then-current arctic blast in Cincinnati, he helped me continue my route, while disrupting his own. …

I am re-upping my Enquirer subscription after 20 years because newsmen and women, from the top down, never die. And sometimes they make the difference in a guy’s life, which happened that day.

Jon Allen, guest columnist for Cincinnati.com

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What questions should moderators ask at tonight’s debate?

The Guardian
"Guys these are questions that are not relevant to what’s being discussed in America today," former Sen. Rick Santorum told reporters today who asked him about whether he really thought Satan was attacking America.

But deciding which questions voters want to hear is not the candidates' job: It belongs, usually, to the journalists asking them.

And at tonight's Republican primary debate in Mesa, Ariz., the question of what questions should be asked is a little louder, thanks in part to a Guardian package that analyzed all the questions asked in all 19 previous Republican primary debates. (more...)
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New tool determines whether a Twitter account is bot or not

Bot or Not
Enter a Twitter handle in the bot test to see whether it appears human or automated.
A journalism class at The New School in New York has created a tool that determines whether a Twitter account is curated by human or bot. Assistant journalism professor Heather Chaplin enlisted The New York Times' Aron Pilhofer and WYNC's John Keefe to work with students on analyzing the "botfestation of the Web" by isolating criteria that would predict whether Twitter accounts are automated or hand-curated. They tracked 179 stories from Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and TechCrunch, tweeted across the Web over 79,000 times by more than 18,000 distinct Twitter users. (more...)
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Fake, real AP Stylebook make up

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Police, Star-Telegram finger the wrong Austin Carpenter

Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Fort Worth police screwed up mightily during an investigation of drug dealing and drug use at Texas Christian University. Eighteen people, 15 of them students, four of them -- gasp -- members of the Horned Frogs football team got popped on various charges, and the police released photos, which were run in local media.

While the original reports were somewhat breathless, a bigger problem was that one of those photos was of the wrong man. Austin Carpenter was named as a suspect at large because one undercover officer bought drugs in a parking lot from a guy named Austin, who drove off in a vehicle registered to someone with the last name Carpenter. (more...)
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