Email Alerts: An Easy Way to Stay Up To Date

By Madison Feller

Wikimedia Commons image from user RRZEicons

Now that it's officially summer, we're sure that you're all knee-high in summer internships, online courses and Netflix shows. With everything going on during these few months, it can be hard to keep up with our friends and family, let alone what's going on in the world.


As students and journalists, it's vital to stay up-to-date on local and national current events, but it can be hard to do everything during your half-hour lunch break. Especially if you also have a list of five different long-form pieces that you've been meaning to finish...

NBC goes all in for online coverage at Sochi

By Cole Kennedy

Screen shot of the NBC Olympics website Feb. 7

This past Friday, at 10 a.m. CST, the Opening Ceremonies of the Winter Olympics kicked off in Sochi, Russia. NBC won't broadcast the show until primetime in the U.S., as the network has done for every Olympics in far flung timezones.

But with the advent of social media, the audience is no longer unaware of the events as they happen. NBC had been hesitant to live stream many events in the past. The network had concerns the stream would cut into primetime ratings. However, the online audience made very vocal complaints about the tape-delay strategy, according to an article on Mashable.

Journalism courses going digital: Can journalism schools really do the same?

By Anna Burkart

Maybe classrooms will be more empty due to online courses
gain popularity, but j-school newsrooms probably won't
be empty anytime soon.

The classrooms are empty with no students to be seen. Everyone is turning in their reporting assignments online and professors are judging students’ reporting abilities without ever meeting them. Could this be journalism schools of the future? The empty classroom image is certainly making its way around sites like Nieman Journalism Lab and PBS Media Shift in the discussion about free online journalism courses.

This past December, the University of Texas’ Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas held it’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). It attracted more than 2,000 students from around the world looking for a free “Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization” course. With online courses growing in popularity, the question becomes: Will online journalism degrees be the norm someday soon?

Online sports journalism at its worst

By Addison Walton

Imagine it's a normal day in your newsroom. You've got some ideas for a column, and you've got some thoughts down on paper, but nothing has clicked yet. Finally, it comes to you: Throw something against the wall to see if it sticks.

Stony Brook Wolftank blog

Meet John Steigerwald of the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa. Stiegerwald is the Pittsburgh-area columnist most famous for writing that a San Francisco Giants fan who was beaten into a coma brought the attack onto himself. He also libeled NHL player Alexander Ovechkin both in print and on the radio.

The Worldwide Leader Makes a Huge Mistake

By Addison Walton

Social media and ESPN have had a very testy relationship during Twitter’s ascension as a convenient source of information and verifiable journalism. Over the past two to three years, ESPN has had its share of problems related to tweeting.

One of the first well-documented cases of the ESPN/Twitter problems involved popular ESPN.com (now Grantland.com) writer Bill Simmons. In October 2009, Simmons, who grew up and went to college in the Boston area, tweeted, “WEEI’s ‘The Big Show’ was apparently ripping me today. Good to get feedback from 2 washed-up athletes and a 60 yr-old fat guy with no neck.” WEEI, an all-sports Boston radio station, signed an agreement with ESPN radio only three weeks before Simmons bashed the station. ESPN.com Editor-in-Chief Rob King suspended Simmons for two weeks because of the tweets, with the only exception being the promotion of his book tour via Twitter. But Simmons would continue poking the fire about one year later.