MONDAY'S LINKS: 'Freep' Collects Unorthodox Source List, Why War Reporters Do It, Bloggers Getting Noticed

By: E&P Staff In today's links, the Gannett-owned Detroit Free Press collects a database of source names that includes race and religion information, the BBC online comes under fire for not giving source credit on wire reports, and Web stars are getting attention (and big bucks) from other media.


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Gannett Paper Seeks a New Kind of Expertise
New York Times: "Gannett, the biggest newspaper company in the country, with 90 dailies, has one of the strongest records in the industry on hiring and promoting minority employees. And it has long encouraged -- and monitored -- the use of minority voices in the content of articles. Still, it came as something of a surprise last week to some at The Detroit Free Press, which was acquired last year by Gannett, when they were told to contribute the names of minority sources to a collective list. Many newspapers keep such lists to help reporters who are assigned to an unfamiliar story, but they identify sources by their expertise. The Free Press list is meant to flag their racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds as well."


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Blogging Pioneer Robert Scoble Leaves Microsoft for Start-Up
Reuters: "Starting in July, Microsoft's best known nonexecutive employee will become PodTech vice president of content, in charge of creating shows for the new medium in which computer users watch television-like interviews over the Web. In a posting late Saturday on his widely read blog site Scobleizer, the Microsoft technology evangelist said he was parting with the Redmond, Wash.-based company on cordial terms."


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Hot Deals for Budding Internet Stars
New York Post: Hungry to discover the next big talent, some of the nation's largest media outlets are now trolling Web sites favored by Internet video auteurs in hopes of discovering the next great -- and profitable -- idea. And they're spreading around development deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. 'We are actively looking to the Web for new talent and are in deal conversations with a lot of newbies - unknowns that we think can become geniuses at what they do,' said Jim Moloshok, HBO's president of media ventures."


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Beeb Under Fire for Wire Service Credits
Wall Street Journal: "Visitors to the BBC's online news site find dispatches from all over the world. But they aren't all from the broadcaster's network of journalists. Instead, the Web site of the British Broadcasting Corp. relies on edited reports from wire services including the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and others, not all credited to those agencies. With the proliferation of news sources on the Web, the use of wire-service reports on subjects or places where news organizations don't have their own staff has become much more common. And in an era when blogs and other sites are filled with material from other sources, the standards of crediting wire services -- so readers know where their news is coming from -- are becoming fuzzier."


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'In Haiti, Killers of Journalists Enjoy 100% Immunity'
Guardian (U.K.): "As attention focuses understandably on the deaths of Paul Douglas and James Brolan, the CBS cameraman and soundman, in Iraq, it is easy to forget that, in some parts of the world, it is the local reporter who runs the greatest risk. In countries such as Haiti, Colombia and the Philippines, journalists face threats and violence on a daily basis from politicians or businessmen whose paths they have crossed."


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'NY Times' Reporter Filkins Snags Book Deal
New York Observer: "New York Times Iraq correspondent Dexter Filkins will be writing a book about his experience covering terrorism in the Middle East. Filkins' agent Amanda Urban at ICM completed the deal on June 6 with Knopf. ... In September, Filkins will leave the Times' Baghdad bureau and begin a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where he will write his book."


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How Much Is That Blogger in the Window?
At a reported cost of around $50,000, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner rented out the highest bar in Vegas to entertain the nearly 1,000 bloggers and online activists who were in town for YearlyKos, a conference sponsored by the largest online community of Democrats in the country. It was old-time retail politics for a new digital age. "This is the new public square," Warner told the crowd in a five-minute address. "This is the new form of democracy."


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Why They Do It: Reporters in Iraq
CJR Daily: "Why does a reporter go to a war zone?" asks Paul McLeary. "Is it careerism? Vanity? Thrill-seeking? Or is it to push personal boundaries, to manufacture some sort of rite of passage that has been mostly lost in contemporary society? Probably, it's a combustible mixture of all of these. There have been a number of memoirs published in the last few years by reporters who have been to Iraq, but few have gone as far in trying to understand their own motivations as freelance journalist David Axe does his new book, 'War Fix'."


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Protecting the Public's Need to Know
Christian Schience Monitor editorial: "For US journalists trying to protect confidential sources - and thus obtain vital news about government or the private sector - these are perilous times. Recent attempts to expose those sources show why a federal media "shield" law is needed now."


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A Newspaper Can't Always Avoid Jarring Juxtapositions
"When editors choose stories for a page, they can easily miss juxtapositions that strike readers as careless, callous or strange," writes Tom Marquardt in The Capitol of Annapolis. "For instance, a story about a good parent that happens to get put next to a photo of a child abuser might briefly confuse readers. Things that aren't obvious when the newspaper is being assembled can belatedly become clear when we see the finished product in our laps."