Discounted webinar for writers

NINA members can get a 25-percent discount next Thursday, May 5, for the Poynter Institute's webinar, "How to Use Detail in Your Writing." So, instead of the $29.95 advertised price, you pay just $22.46. The webinar will last an hour and 15 minutes. The instructor is Steven Gray, Washington correspondent for TIME magazine.

Contact me for the discount code. You have to register prior to the 1 p.m. CDT start time to receive the discount. But, once you've signed up for the live event, you also get automatic access to the replay, which will be available by May 10, allowing you to watch as often as you want, whenever you want.

In the Year 2000 ...

Watch this Knight Ridder video from 1994, about how newspapers, by the turn of the century, would migrate to tablet devices that look a lot like the iPad. Then the web happened.

First vs. Fair

The Rockford Register Star published results today of a four-month investigation into allegations about the city's (now departing) school superintendent. These allegations stemmed from a long letter written to the superintendent by a departing administrator. A weekly newspaper in Rockford, The Rock River Times, FOIA'd for the letter, received it several months ago and immediately published it. The Register Star -- in the face of critics that said it was protecting the superintendent -- chose not to publish it until allegations could be checked out.

Here's Register Star executive editor Linda Grist Cunningham's accompanying blog post about how the paper approached this thorny ethical issue.

And here's the letter in question, turned by the Register Star into an interactive graphic where all of the serious charges are footnoted.

Tricky stuff. By the time the paper's investigation was finished and published, the superintendent had resigned -- her last day is this Saturday. And anyone who wanted to see the letter had already seen it on the Rock River Times website.

In the face of all that, the Register Star stuck to its journalistic principles and had the story last ... but probably best.

A sticky ethical issue

Repeating a semi-annual complaint: Those sticker ads on the front pages of newspapers are annoying enough. But political ads plasted across a newspaper's flag, saying "Vote for John Doe," really ought to trigger ethical alarm bells.

That's not too idealistic, is it?