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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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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How will we reinvent news for Google’s new augmented-reality eyeglasses?

The New York Times | 9to5 Google
Nick Bilton reports Google will be selling eyeglasses with an embedded digital display by the end of the year. What kinds of new news products and sources will emerge to fit this new class of devices?

Bilton's sources say the Android-powered headsets will cost "around the price of current smartphones." They'll have a small screen on the side of the viewing area, wireless Internet access, and sensors like GPS, an accelerometer and a front-facing camera to "monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby." This description sounds similar to the glasses envisioned by Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan in "The Storm Collection," their vision of a future when digital information overlays every part of the real world. (more...)
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Colvin was supposed to leave Syria Tuesday, but stayed for a story

Newsday
Rosemarie Colvin says her daughter Marie was planning to leave Syria Tuesday but stayed to finish a story she was working on.
"She had a story she felt was very important," Rosemarie Colvin said, adding: "She would take one more day." ...

"She was absolutely dedicated to doing what she did at the highest level ... It's the way she always was. Even when she was young she marched to her own tune ... She was totally dedicated to getting the story straight and getting it out."
Colvin, who died overnight in Syria while reporting for The Sunday Times, graduated from Long Island's Oyster Bay High School and attended Yale.

Related: 6 journalists have been killed in Syria in the last few months | UK politicians pay tribute to Colvin | Is Syria targeting journalists? | Colvin's final story has been published by the Times (The Sunday Times) | Are foreign correspondents like Colvin & Shadid a vanishing breed? (Poynter) | Marie Colvin killed in Syria, other journalists wounded overnight (Poynter).
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Storify iPad app should draw more users and live coverage

StorifyiTunes Store | The Next Web
Storify's brand-new iPad app unveiled this morning should extend the curation tool to new, more-casual users and increase the live-blogging of conferences and events.
The new Storify iPad app enables easy, intuitive story building.
In general, the app offers the same service the Web version of Storify does. But its touch-based interface is more intuitive for drag-and-drop story building. And the availability on a portable device now means more people can Storify an event live. There's also a new feature to tweet from within the app, so you can quickly post your own updates while curating others'. (more...)
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Are foreign correspondents like Colvin and Shadid a vanishing breed?

Mashable
Overnight, there were reports of the deaths of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in Homs, Syria. The correspondents were reporting in extremely hostile territory: "It’s too much of a coincidence,” the New York Times reported a Syrian activist in Cairo saying. “There are reports of planes flying around and they may be looking for the satellite uplinks.”

As foreign bureaus get rarer, people intent on covering conflicts now often have to lean on the crowd rather than the soft bosom of a wealthy journalistic institution. (more...)
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Marie Colvin killed in Syria, other journalists wounded overnight

Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and French photographer Remi Ochlik have been killed in Homs, Syria. A Reuters story says two other journalists have been wounded: Paul Conroy, a British photographer, and "a female American journalist." A New York Times story says there are three wounded journalists. The killed and injured were in a house in use as a media center that was hit with rockets, activists in Homs say.

>>The Editor of the Sunday Times: "Marie was an extraordinary figure in the life of The Sunday Times, driven by a passion to cover wars in the belief that what she did mattered."

>>Colvin was interviewed by Anderson Cooper Tuesday, Brian Stelter tweets.

>>Colvin on war reporting: "We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?" | Colvin last week: "Shocked by the news of the death of Anthony Shadid, a brilliant journalist and writer whose work glowed with his humanity and was always so kind and gentle."

>>Andy Carvin has been tweeting about the deaths from Tripoli: "These reporters and citizen journos muster more bravery in a day than I ever will in a lifetime. I am forever in their debt. #syria #homs"

>>"The best memorial to her would be to renew and expand our commitment to ‘conflict journalism,' " writes Charlie Beckett.

• There was a memorial yesterday in Beirut for Anthony Shadid, who died last week in Syria. Family, friends and journalists spoke. “It’s going to be so much emptier without him,” the Washington Post quotes Steve Fainaru saying. “I really will miss him so, so much.” A tribute to Shadid in Oklahoma City is planned for March 3. (more...)
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