Blogging presentation now online

I've posted the PowerPoint to my presentation on the ethics of blogging, both here and in the course documents at right. You may find it useful in dealing with your final exam.

Your grades thus far

I have posted all of your grades to this point on Blackboard. Since Monday is our last class, this would be a good time to check everything and make sure it matches up with where you think you're at. I will confess to having occasionally misrecorded a grade, so make sure you take a look.

Prepping for Thursday's class II

Paul Levy has provided me with a list of posts that he would like us to read in advance of our class on Thursday. Please do him the courtesy of reading these and coming prepared with questions and comments.

• "Descending into Xenophobia," March 14
  
• "Compensation for Directors of Non-profits," March 5
  
• "Thank You, Senators!", March 3
  
• "Query on National Health Care Legislation," March 2
  
• "The Mutating Playbook," Feb. 21
  

They're all pretty short, which suggests that he know more about how to write a blog than I do.

Prepping for Thursday's class

This coming Thursday I'll do what I hope will be a brief presentation on New York Times blogger/critic Virginia Heffernan and her controversial post on Ron Paul's possible ties to neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups. I would like to move to a discussion after that. So please make sure you catch up on the reading for this week.

Also, our final guest speaker of the semester will be Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the author of the blog Running a Hospital. Levy will discuss the ethical minefields he encounters as a newsmaker who now has a way of communicating unfiltered with the public rather than exclusively through the news media. Please familiarize yourself with his blog and what he's been writing about over the past few weeks.

Richard Chacón assignment

Just to put this into writing — your assignment is to write a 700-word news story in which you will cover former Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón's talk. You will also incorporate two pieces of outside reading to give your story context and depth. Stories from the reading list are fine. Use normal journalistic attribution, i.e., "As Mary Smith wrote in the American Journalism Review in March 1992 ..."

Deadline: Monday, April 7, at the beginning of class.

I have also posted today's slideshow here, and under "Course documents."

Civic journalism slides posted

I've posted the PowerPoint presentation on civic journalism here. You'll also find it under "Course documents," at right.

"A Hidden Life" online

If you were unable to join us in class on Monday, please watch the "Frontline" documentary "A Hidden Life," which is online here. We will continue our discussion of it for about another half-hour tomorrow. Specifically, I want to go a little deeper on the issues of undercover reporting and the outing of closeted gay men and lesbians.