Breaking news, death and Facebook friends

HARTLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. — A blog post from Poynter today discusses the ethics of should a reporter contact a person’s friends on Facebook after that person died during a breaking news event. The Poynter experts weigh in. Notice, this is one of those tough, case-by-case, situations, but they do offer good advice. Feel free to give your two cents here (Remember, you could earn a point in the EC contest).

Don’t forget the labels (tags)

HARTLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. — We learned from the text (pages 63-64) that tags can help people find related posts within a site and potentially help people searching the Internet find your posts.

So, over the weekend, I added the requirement of adding tags (called labels in Blogger) for your first post. Get used to adding them because you’ll be required to have them with every post. I've taken a few minutes and added labels and a widget for the labels, which you should see on the right (It's the cloud display, BTW). Notice that the greatest number is “online journalism,” which I basically put in nearly every post. Now, after this week, I might remove “online journalism” from the widget because if you clicked on it, you’d find virtually every post on this blog, but it’s good to keep as a label so people searching on the Internet might find the post because of the label. Yes, this can be tricky, I know.

Also, note you have several options in creating your label widget on the right (see screen shot above from my computer). Note, I didn’t require the label widget this week, but adding it now would help you get an “A.”