News

Giving proper credit to some dogged (or Dawg’ged?) Georgia journalists

Year in and year out, the student reporters at the University of Georgia's Red and Black (full disclosure: it's my old law school) set an example for the journalism world -- college and professional -- about the power of public records.UGA journalists have won national recognition for their aggressive reporting on sexually harassing behavior by professors that their university downplayed and at times inadequately punished.

Judge orders UC-Berkeley police to return photos to journalist

Photojournalist David Morse will be receiving photos confiscated from him by the police after a judge ruled last week that University of California-Berkeley police who searched his camera in December did so illegally.Morse was covering a demonstration outside of the chancellor's residence for the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, or Indybay, when law enforcement officials arrested him.

Wisconsin school district moves toward banning bar ads in yearbook

A Wisconsin school district is contemplating the unusual step of banning yearbook ads that -- at least among American high schools -- are themselves quite unusual.Edgerton School District’s superintendent, responding to complaints from some community members, recently told Edgerton High School’s yearbook staff to purge its advertiser list of alcohol-based businesses, such as bars, grills and liquor stores, according to the Janesville Gazette. The school board plans to provide a list of "approved" advertisers to the yearbook this fall, and the indications are that at least some alcohol vendors won't make the cut.For nearly 50 years, The Crimson Tide Annual has published ads submitted by local businesses, including those that sell alcohol, to help cover its publication costs.

Saving education coverage – here’s one solution that costs nothing, except trust

One-point-four percent. That is how much of their time and space leading news organizations are devoting to education coverage, according to scholars at The Brookings Institution who've studied how the decline in staffing at mainstream media outlets is impacting both the quantity and the quality of school news.The Brookings study, "Invisible: 1.4 Percent Coverage for Education is Not Enough," was released in December 2009 by a team headed by Darrell M.