No Wikipedia for French reporters

Here's an interesting story from London about how the Agence France-Presse, the oldest press agency in the world surpassing even AP and Reuters, is now barring its reporters from using Facebook and Wikipedia as sources. I couldn't find any rules that were issued by US papers to their reporters, but I'm sure they exist and are probably fairly common. The two sites are classified under virtual sources, which many papers have written rules and ethics codes about. This story came out just this year, which makes me wonder what took them so long to decide since Wikipedia has become so popular.

Another for the "wrong pronoun" file

"The differences between Barack and I pale in comparison to the differences that we have with the Republicans," Clinton said.

Ack! Ack! Ack! Not that a misused "I" bothers me at all...

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Bush becoming too predictable

I'm not sure if it's just me, but it seems that the state of the union addresses over the past several years have become somewhat repetitive. Sure, the president is supposed to address the important issues in our nation, but does it have to be the same thing every year.

Nothing against Bush, but it was almost predictable as to what he was going to say. It's like I already knew what he was going to say before the words left his mouth. To be fair I had the speech transcript, but still...when are the new issues going to come into play?

Here is the link to the transcript: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/01/20080128-13.html

Notice the visual editing in this

Note the symmetry and grouping of the readouts, the repetition of the red lead-ins. The "magnet" of this portion of the page is near Bush's hand. The directional lines in the image work perfectly to lead the reader into the information. What else can you find?

For a wonderful review of books on blogs...

...take a look at Sarah Boxer's article in The New York Review of Books. Here's an excerpt:

A growing stack of books has pondered the effects of blogs and bloggers on culture (We've Got Blog and Against the Machine), on democracy (Republic .com 2.0), on politics (Blogwars), on privacy (The Future of Reputation), on media (Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation and We're All Journalists Now), on professionalism (The Cult of the Amateur), on business (Naked Conversations), and on all of the above (Blog!). But what about the effect of blogs on language?

Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?

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Journalists invade Arizona

With the Super Bowl a week away, journalists are flooding into the Valley -- more than 3,500 of them, according to an azcentral.com article.

I think this is pretty cool considering the consistent notion of print journalism being a reeling field and at least for this week, Arizona will be hosting a massive contingency of the "endangered species."

I've had the opportunity to work for the Arizona Cardinals as a media relations assistant the past two seasons, so I've seen the activity in the University of Phoenix stadium press box and I can't imagine what it'll be like filled to the brim. It was always cool to see all the writers rushing on deadline and after the big game, I'm sure the tension will be thick enough you could cut it with a knife.

And to think, more than 2,000 other journalists had their applications for credentials rejected, according to the article.

Read the entire article

The photo above is roughly the view from the press box. Photo from thenewstribune.com