SPJ Blogs

I'm exhausted. I'm currently working on a 3,000-word feature story and an 1,800-word department, wrangling the editorial interns, putting Web-exclusive copy on my magazine's site, and writing/editing items for the calendar section. Ah! I'm not quite burned...

Award-winning Washington Post reporters Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest just concluded a stunning series, "Careless Detention: Medical Care in Immigrant Prisons." Some 33,000 immigrants are crammed into these facilities, often for minor offenses, and many...

Reporters Without Borders is maintaining a steady drumbeat on the press freedoms issues in China as the 2008 Olympics approach. Remember that Beijing promised to allow more press freedom as the Olympics near. To show their commitment to their...

The cologne-scented pages of the May GQ feature a wonderful story about, of all things, garbage. In "This is Paradise," Jeanne Marie Laskas describes with pungent detail the Puente Hills Landfill near Los Angeles and the philosophical men and massive...

One of the great sessions at the National Freedom of Information Coalition conference in Philadelphia last weekend focused on comparing state public records law. Everyone always seems to think their public records law is the best or worst in the nation....

Karl Idsvoog of Kent State University's School of Journalism & Mass Communicationannounces a site created for students preparing to enter the job market. Called  MediaJobPod, the site provides online / broadcast news and production majors with...

When Tom McGrath's daughter Sarah had her appendix removed, the doctors and nurses did everything right. But when McGrath got the bill for her hospital stay, none of it made sense to him. "My Daughter's $29,000 Appendectomy" in Philadelphia Magazine...

The Associated Press and the West Virginia Supreme Court argued Monday in Circuit Court over whether justices are required to make public their e-mails. The court argues that they don't have to provide private e-mails, even if sent by public employees...

The National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University, collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. Peter Carlson of The Washington...

The U.S. Department of Education is proposing rule changes for interpreting and implementing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and they would not bode well for journalists or the ability to hold schools accountable. The proposals...

The University of Mississippi has agreed to release to the public an agreement that was previously kept secret regarding a donor's $5.3 million contribution to the university's department of journalism. The donation was given to the...

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver wants state agencies to start charging requesters for the cost of attorneys reviewing public records requests (see Associated Press story). This is dangerous stuff. It's bad enough when an agency tries to charge for search and retrieval...

Interesting posting on the status of Lebanonese media at the SPJ Al-Sahafiyeen site. http://www.spj.org/blog/blogs/aaj/archive/2008/05/12/20539.aspx For those not keeing up on such things, "Al-Sahafiyeen" is the Arabic word for "journalists" or "the...

Just as every minority in Lebanon has its own militia, every political aspect has its own media. Lebanon, which supposedly has the most "free" media in the Middle East, is really a place where media manipulation is driven by the politics of the editorial...

The magnificent and moving "The Things That Carried Him" by Chris Jones in the May issue of Esquire narrates the nine-day journey that Sgt. Joe Montgomery's body took between his death in Iraq and his burial in an Indiana cemetery. Moving backward through...

This is a cool new pilot project that could have amazing ramifications for freedom of information and news: www.everyblock.com. This Web site, launched earlier this year, provides people daily updates of news, crime, new businesses, road construction...

Toni Locy says she never thought a federal shield law was needed. That is, until she ended up facing nearly $50,000 in fines and potential jail time for doing her job. That's what she told a gathering that I attended Saturday at the annual National Freedom...

The Twitter trial seems to be working.  So far. It's a modification of what we began last fall: live updates of a capital murder trial in the killing of a small-town Kansas sheriff. It was a way of live blogging from the courtroom. ...

Finally some one is paying attention to the growing power of the drug cartels in Mexico. Several years back the SPJ joined with other journalism groups around the world to raise concerns about the number of journalists being killed or intimidated by...

It's a reporter's nightmare: trying to cover a devastating natural disaster in a country controlled by a paranoid military junta. The news out of Burma this week has been spotty after a cyclone killed tens of thousands of people or perhaps more than 100,000 --...

Toni Locy, the former USA Today reporter who could face huge fines for failing to reveal her confidential sources, will argue her appeal Friday at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. She wrote about the 2001 anthrax mailings, naming Steven Hatfill...

Culture can change as quickly in the newsroom as an editor can slap a new lead on a story. Just a few weeks ago, I wondered if anyone outside our online team – which I had been banished from sometime last summer – got or cared about Web-first...

"A Trail of Deception," by Justin Fenton of The Baltimore Sun, is an nicely written 3-chapter series on the multistate criminal career of Cindy McKay. Near the beginning of chapter 1, Fenton introduces McKay: The mother of six, McKay was far closer to...

Do you read the FOI FYI blog? I guess you do if you read this. Then we need your feedback. We here at SPJ are thinking about how to better serve members and that includes through the blogs. One suggestion batted around this past week was to ditch the...

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