February Awards Voting

LINK to survey

Online Pacemaker Winners

The nation’s best high school newspaper websites. Click for inspiration.

Our Incomprable Awesomeness!

Moreau is bragging about our awards – both the NSPA Pacemaker and the Gold Medal from teh CSPA critique, making these official press releases and putting it on the school’s website. Be proud, be very proud.

Mmm…pie charts

This is NOT just for Kimmie.

How to Create Professional 3D Pie Charts in Illustrator

A solid editorial

This is from Paly High’s newspaper, The Campanile. It’s an example of the staff taking a firm stand on a very relevant school issue. Note the organized outline of reasons and the concrete suggestion at the end – standard editorial form.

E-book incovenient and detrimental to learning.

10 Hopeful Thoughts About the Future of Journalism

David Beard, on Poynter’s site, says:

So much gloom and doom, most of it warranted. You could almost predict this future-of-journalism talk. But let’s play contrarian. Let’s focus on great reasons to pay attention to — or participate in — creating, gathering and distributing news and information. Here are 10 hopeful points about the future of journalism.

Unethical cropping

A photographer was outraged at the way Newsweek cropped a photo he had taken of Dick Cheney. They also paired it with a quote Cheney made about CIA interrogations

He wrote, on the NY TImes Lens blog:

Newsweek’s objective in running the cropped version was to illustrate its editorial point of view, which could only have been done by shifting the content of the image so that readers just saw what the editors wanted them to see. This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

See it here, with an update from the photographer about how Newsweek’s spokesperson responded.

When there’s no good photo to take

I saw this photoshopped collage on The Grizzly Gazette‘s site – they’re a high school from the Central Valley.

This is one of those stories where it’s hard to find a photo. We made do with pictures of kids sanitizing hands, although the problem there is when it’s staged. Here’s another way to tackle it – using photoshop to make an interesting image out of a couple different images.

Click here to read the whole story.

Recommendations from a pro

I heard this on NPR this morning – an editor from The Daily Beast, an influential blog, recommends great web-reading. This Vanity Fair piece about the Mumbai attacks is what struck me, as it struck her, because of its narrative style.

Listen to the interview, and read the story.

An ethical photograph question

This photo ran on the front page of the NY Times, and readers had two major issues with it. What do you think those issues were?

Click here to read all about the reaction and the photographer’s explanation.