Journalism

ABC News is going back to school. The network announced Wednesday that it was opening five college campus bureaus in September at journalism schools around the country. The multimedia bureaus will be staffed by undergraduate and graduate journalism students who will report stories for the news division's online offerings, as well as its broadcast news programs. ABC News will provide mentoring and stipends for the bureaus' student staffers, as well as the video and editing equipment to produce their stories.

The newspapers and websites were full Monday morning with stories about Sunday's eclipse: finely done accounts with facts, figures, quotations and on-the-scene reporting. Will any win the Pulitzer Prize? Only time will tell. But if so, there is precedent: The 1924 Pulitzer Prize for reporting went to Magner White, a reporter for the San Diego Sun, for his account of a noontime solar eclipse that occurred Sept. 10, 1923. White's account, in the lean, vivid prose of the day, had weird gusts of wind hitting the city, circus animals pacing and roaring, prostitutes falling to their knees and vowing to change their wicked ways, and San Diego residents exchanging "ghastly smiles, pale lilies they are. " The Sun's story was on the stands within minutes of the eclipse becoming total.

The list of freelance writing gigs on Craigslist goes on and on. Trails.com will pay $15 for articles about the outdoors. Livestrong.com wants 500-word pieces on health for $30, or less. In this mix, the 16 cents a word offered by Green Business Quarterly ends up sounding almost bounteous, amounting to more than $100 per submission. Other publishers pitch the grand opportunities they provide to "extend your personal brand" or to "showcase your work, influence others." That means working for nothing, just like the sailing magazine that offers its next editor-writer not a single doubloon but, instead, the opportunity to "participate in regattas all over the country."

The Los Angeles Times won Newspaper of the Year for 2011 among the state's largest daily newspapers and a total of 20 journalism awards as part of the annual Better Newspaper Contest, officials announced Saturday. The Times won first-place awards among newspapers with a circulation of 150,000 or more in the following categories: local government coverage, investigative reporting, sports, and arts and entertainment. The paper also received second prize for design and general excellence in the contest sponsored by the California Newspaper Publishers Assn., a nonprofit trade group.

Is there anything that could persuade muckraking Tijuana journalist Jesus Blancornelas to lay down his pen? A nearly successful assassination attempt by the Tijuana drug cartel failed to silence him. He waves away the inconvenience of life with 13 army bodyguards as just another bizarre plot twist in his episodic career.

CONTENTS: PREFACE: A Business Deal Done--A Controversy Born CHAPTER 1: The Deal CHAPTER 2: The Debate CHAPTER 3: The Meeting CHAPTER 4: The Decision CHAPTER 5: The Hard Sell CHAPTER 6: The Prelude CHAPTER 7: The Visitor CHAPTER 8: The Press CHAPTER 9: The Wall CHAPTER 10: Otis CHAPTER 11: The Aftermath Journalism Is A Very Different Business--Here's Why [see sidebar] Another Staples-Like Proposal Was Made to Times [see sidebar] * PREFACE / A Business Deal Done -- A Controversy Born The newsroom

Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL's $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it's already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy. That's a development that will hurt not only the people who gather and edit the news but also readers and viewers. To understand why, it's helpful to step back from the wide-eyed coverage focused on foundering AOL's last-ditch effort to stave off the oblivion of irrelevance, or Brentwood-based Arianna Huffington's astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years.

Even a new-age reading of the 10 Commandments would seem to make it quite clear: Thou shall not steal. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's computer files and text messages. But one news story in recent days suggests it's not quite that simple. New technology has supercharged the debate over what should be in the public domain but done nothing to clarify the answers.

It's been more than a quarter-century since futurist Stewart Brand said, "Information wants to be free. " In about half that time, the founders of Google have accumulated fabulous riches by putting free information a mouse click away. Six years on, Arianna Huffington has shown that free content, assembled by a couple hundred paid journalists and thousands of unpaid bloggers, can pay off in a big way — at least for her. In recent days, the second part of Brand's aphorism has also been proved.

The winners PUBLIC SERVICE The Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier BREAKING NEWS REPORTING The Seattle Times staff INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News, and Sheri Fink of ProPublica, in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine EXPLANATORY REPORTING Michael Moss and members of the New York Times staff LOCAL REPORTING Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee...

A future president sits shirtless in his rent-controlled Manhattan apartment working the New York Times crossword while his girlfriend looks on, an emotional barrier separating him from those close to him. He is unsure of his future path in life but certain that it will be one he builds himself. That's the portrait David Maraniss paints of a young Barack Obama in an upcoming biography, "Barack Obama: The Story," which is excerpted in Vanity Fair. The biography ends as Obama heads to Harvard Law School, but the excerpt is mostly about Obama's early love life.

Hilton Kramer, one of the art world's most polarizing and widely read critics for 50 years and founding editor of the conservative arts journal The New Criterion, died Tuesday in Harpswell, Maine. He was 84. Kramer had a rare blood disorder and died of heart failure, said New Criterion's current editor Roger Kimball. A staunch champion of modernism and fearless detractor of most of the art that followed, Kramer was chief art critic for the New York Times for nearly a decade before giving up the coveted post to start New Criterion in 1982.

Without Anne Lamott, the entire sub-category of contemporary parent writing - which includes Brett Paesel, Christie Mellor, Ayun Halliday - as well as all those mommy bloggers - probably wouldn't exist. Her 1993 bestseller "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year" set the standard, acknowledging the doubts and the difficulties, the sense that many first-time parents have of being cast into an alternate universe where simply taking a shower and getting dressed in clean clothes is a moral victory over the chaos and entropy that every infant leaves in his or her wake.

The secret to Silicon Valley's success, we've been told, is its ecosystem: Where else in the world can you find such a large, symbiotic collection of expert visionaries, engineers, marketers, financiers? How about influence peddlers? Technology news bloggers' curious habit of accepting investments from the very people they're presumed to be covering objectively blew up last week over what might be termed the Path Affair. Path, a San Francisco social networking company, got caught downloading users' address books from their iPhones without their permission.

Anonymous Kollektiv, a German group claiming ties to the shadowy hacker group Anonymous, signalled out the Wall Street Journal today as the target of a crowd sourced "comments" flash mob. To be clear: No servers were brought down, the Wall Street Journal's site didn't go dark and no reporter's sensitive source list was hacked. Instead, hundreds of people posted a relatively mild paragraph in the comment section on various Facebook pages run by the Journal, suggesting that the paper was trying to stir up fear in Americans by comparing Anonymous to Al Qaeda.

Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal reporter with a flair for inspirational stories who produced three nonfiction bestsellers, beginning with the 2008 book "The Last Lecture" about life lessons from a dying man, was killed in a car crash Friday. He was 53. Zaslow's death was announced on the website of Detroit's Fox 2 News, where his wife, Sherry Margolis, is an anchor. Zaslow was driving on a snow-covered highway in northern Michigan when he lost control and was hit by a truck.

When a bright young reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer named Monica Guzman mentioned a couple of years ago that she planned to post a story with a Web link to the rival Seattle Times, colleagues didn't swallow their tongues. But close. Joel Connelly, a veteran political columnist at the Post-Intelligencer, found that his forays away from his beat, to review books and write about religion, made union overseers all twitchy. They didn't like anybody coloring outside the lines.

Whether through cave paintings, drumbeats, hieroglyphics or printed pages, news has played an important role in people's lives. The Founding Fathers believed that newspapers were so important to a democracy that the 1st Amendment to the Constitution provides for freedom of the press. Learn about the history of news, keep up with current events and try writing your own articles through the direct links on the Times Launch Point Web site: http://www.latimes.

Type 1a supernovae, exploding stars that can outshine entire galaxies, were instrumental to the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that a mysterious "dark energy" is fueling the expansion of the universe. But astronomers haven't been able to pin down what causes these massive stellar explosions. Now, after studying a Type 1a supernova in a nearby galaxy, two researchers say that they must be the result of a collision between two white dwarf stars. They made their case this week in the journal Nature.

The ruling African National Congress pushed a secrecy law through Parliament on Tuesday over the objections of Nobel laureates, opposition politicians and editors who complained that it will have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and investigative journalism in a country rife with corruption. Critics said the law, which makes it illegal to reveal state secrets, lacks a provision allowing a legal defense for acting in the public interest by exposing criminality, corruption or incompetence.