[CW:MONTHLY] 'One Year Later': Covering the Virginia Tech Anniversary

By Mallary Jean Tenmore, Poynter Insitute

One year after the Virginia Tech shootings, The Roanoke (Va.) Times is taking a different approach to the anniversary story: producing a live multimedia project that is evolving as the campus recalls the tragedy.

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[CW:MONTHLY] State of the Media 2008: Decoupling Blues

By Rick Edmonds
Courtesy of The Poynter Institute

Advertising takes center stage in the fifth edition of the State of the News Media report, released Monday by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The heart of the problem, especially for newspapers, is not loss of audience but "a broken economic model - the decoupling of advertising and news," the report finds. "Advertisers are not migrating to news Web sites with audiences, and online, news sites are already falling financially behind other kinds of Web destinations."

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[CW:MONTHLY] Tuesday's Problem: Should Journalists Declare Party Allegiance?

By Kelly McBride
Courtesy of The Poynter Institute

In the past two weeks I've been asked over and over if newsrooms should allow journalists to participate in caucuses and primaries where voters must publicly declare a political affiliation in order to get a ballot.

Editors and news directors want to know what boundaries to set. Journalists everywhere get uncomfortable when it feels like their right to vote clashes with newsroom policies.

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[CW:MONTHLY] Endorsements: A Journalistic Obligation?

By Mallary Jean Tenore
Courtesy of The Poynter Institute

When members of The Concord (N.H.) Monitor's editorial board met to assess the 2008 presidential candidates, they reached a unanimous agreement: Mitt Romney should not be the next president.

So the paper published an anti-endorsement on Dec. 22, calling Romney a "phony" and "a disquieting figure who sure looks like the next president and most surely must be stopped."

One week later, the paper ran its traditional endorsements, encouraging readers to vote for John McCain and Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's New Hampshire presidential primaries.

Despite research challenging the effectiveness of endorsements, many news organizations embrace the tradition because, as they see it, endorsing candidates is a journalistic obligation to readers.

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[CW:MONTHLY] Covering Debates: Advice From Inside the Pressroom

By Mallary Jean Tenore
Courtesy of The Poynter Institute

When Rudy Giuliani's aide, Tony Carbonetti, entered the press room, Mark Halperin turned on his video camera. Halperin, editor at large and senior political analyst for TIME magazine, carries his camera with him whenever he's reporting, he said, because there is almost always an opportunity to use multimedia reporting. He video taped Carbonetti talking about the news that had just broken about questionable expenses that Giuliani billed. Following his interview with Carbonetti, Halperin sent the raw video to TIME. Shortly after, it was uploaded to his blog, The Page.

"If you're not providing all content on all media, you're not really fulfilling your maximum potential," said Halperin, who joined journalists in covering the CNN-YouTube Republican debate in St. Petersburg, Fla., Wednesday night. He assigned letter grades to each candidate on his blog, giving the highest grade, a B+, to Mike Huckabee, and the lowest grade, a D, to Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo.

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[CW:MONTHLY] Sexuality & Equality: 'Balance' is an Act

By Cindi E. Deutschman-Ruiz
Courtesy of The Poynter Institute

Several years ago, when I was working in public radio and television in Central Pennsylvania, I developed a multimedia project called "Race Matters." The project explored the intersection of race and everything I could think of: parenting, relationships, education, humor, literature and health/heath care, among many other topics.

I never addressed whether race is important; whether racism is wrong; or whether racism is a current reality or a historical fact. That's because the existence of "Race Matters" itself was an answer to all those questions: Yes, race is important. Yes, racism is wrong. Yes, racism persists.

It is no longer problematic in our country to have discussions in which these answers are understood as facts. There’s no more need to debate them these days than to argue over whether the Earth is flat, or exists at the center of the universe.

But envision a project about sexuality, not race, and imagine its basic assumptions to be that sexuality has always existed along a continuum; that there is nothing unnatural or sinful about it; and that expressions of condemnation for homosexuality just perpetuate prejudice.

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