- More than 30 per cent of journalists do not use social networking sites.

- 52 per cent of journalists don’t use Twitter.

- One-third of journalists do not read blogs.

- More than half don’t watch videos online.

- 75 percent of journalists do not listen to podcasts.

Yet 91 percent “agree that new media and communications tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent.”

Some rather crazy numbers from the Second Annual Middleberg/SNCR Survey of Media in the Wired World, as reported by Tom Forenski.

Note: This is the third survey I’ve come across in as many days that I need to sit down and read. My PDF pile grows tall.

We’re now targeting the 3.0 release for early May

God help us. WordPress 3.0 is almost here, and the new menu system looks sweet.

As revolutionary as forethought might be in some newsrooms, the smart front pages produced at the LAT since the tighter deadlines were implemented suggest that early closes could lead to more of the deep, interpretive coverage that newspapers are uniquely equipped to deliver.

By playing to print’s singular capability to illuminate complex and subtle subjects, publishers can strengthen the competitive stance of the products that generate the vast majority of their revenues.

And that would be a good thing, too, because print cannot possibly match the speed, drama and timeliness that CNN or Twitter can bring to any breaking story.

Unfortunately for newspapers, too many editors and reporters feel their front pages have to match the evening news, instead of setting the agenda for the day on which they appear.

This anachronistic thinking leads to stale and unimaginative front pages that tend to reinforce the growing public perception that newspapers are stale and unimaginative products.

This is a simple change that could make for some big results in improving the quality of newspaper front pages. However, you’d have to overcome a heck of a lot of inertia in newsrooms that are used to the later deadlines.

Journalists often talk and write about how bad it is, which makes me wonder why we find it acceptable to do almost nothing to prevent it? The general attitude towards plagiarism checking seems to be, “Let’s save our money and let readers and other people catch the culprits.”

This comes from Craig Silverman at the Columbia Journalism Review. He’s right about one thing: Every time a journalistic plagiarist is outed, news critics and pundits get up in arms about plagiarism for a few weeks before letting the issue blow over.

I don’t like the idea of running everything a newspaper produces through a plagiarism-detecting algorithm, but there’s got to be something else we can do to keep journos honest.

My suggestion: Open up the journalistic process to public scrutiny. Encourage reporters to keep blogs where they chronicle their research. Some people call this “showing your work,” just like back in high school algebra. If everything we do is out there for the public to see, we’ll have an incentive to stay honest, and we might just earn back some of the trust that people seem to have lost in journalists over the past few decades.

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania was recently sued after allegedly spying on a student using a school-owned laptop via the laptop’s built-in Web cam.

In this note to parents, sent Thursday night, which we obtained, the school says it was a security feature, and that it was only used “for the narrow purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop” and that the district “never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.”

If true, this sounds more reasonable, but it’s still a bit creepy. The district has disabled the feature.

This story was featured on the CBS News tonight too. Crazy stuff.

At a very fundamental, core level, Springston did not share our vision for a news publication with a progressive perspective. He held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News. It just wasn’t the right fit.

We have already begun drafting a more programmatic statement on our editorial position regarding objectivity, inter-subjectivity, and news.

A newspaper fired a reporter for believing that objective truth exists. Talk about a philosophical dispute.