Following is a roundup of 10 interesting PR- and media-related stories found online last week:

The Answer to a Struggling Journalist's Career: An Inheritance: Journalism is becoming a world filled with writers who have attained their positions thanks to some form of privilege, some detachment from the struggles of the everyday middle-class person. This is the account of a writer who was rescued from her dark days of financial struggles, avoiding unpaid internships, finding a "debtor's refuge" in a doctoral program and welfare thanks to an unexpected inheritance, which was enough to pay off her student loans. "It’s not that I feel like a cheat -- I’ve long realized that money is necessary to launch a creative career. How else does one do an unpaid internship? But the fact that I’ve proved the rule in my profession makes me wonder just what kind of profession it is." (Random House of Canada)

The Media's Use of Graphic Images From the Empire State Building Shooting: There are three questions to ask yourself before publishing graphic images: 1) What is the journalistic value of the photos? 2) What is the one and degree of usage? 3) How will you warn your audience and explain your decisions to the public? With that in mind, here's a look at how major national and New York media handled graphic images in their coverage of the Empire State Building shooting. (Poynter)

BuzzFeed Takes on Washington, D.C.: BuzzFeed's Washington, D.C., bureau opened in July, bringing the website's concise and "snackable" style of content packaging to politics stories in a bigger way. The trusted voice BuzzFeed owns is built upon its tone and structure. The site aims to break news and conduct serious journalism. Its only trick will be "breaking down the divide between the light and the serious." (Nieman Journalism Lab)

Eggs, Cigarettes and a Lack of Reporting: "Study: Eggs Are Nearly as Bad for Your Arteries as Cigarettes." That was the headline of an article on The Atlantic's website, an article that did not assess the cited study's credibility or share the perspectives of outside experts. Taking a study at face value is fine for some topics, "But when you’re a major news outlet and the study is concluding that eggs, a staple food, are nearly as bad for you as cigarettes, I’d like to see you do some reporting." (The Last Word On Nothing)

How Savvy PR Can Save Groupon and Facebook: Groupon and Facebook have recently come across their share of financial struggles. With this comes the disappearance of all the public relations excitement that accompanies the companies as they approached their respective IPOs. Still, there are ways PR can make these Internet sensations look better than they do right now. (PR Daily)

How Journalists Can Stay Safe Online: Whether in dangerous areas abroad or "safe" at home, journalists need to understand how to protect their data. Here's a rundown of how journalists can keep safe while surfing the Web, using your email and using social media. (IJNet)

What Is Journalism for?: Online media is adored by publishers because it's so measurable. But why are these metrics measured in the first place? Is it for advertisers or to verify journalism's worth to society? "Before we can properly measure whether online journalism -- of any kind -- is effective or not, we have to answer the question: What is journalism for?" (GigaOM)

How to Make Your Company's Blog Rock: With a hat tip to Jeff Bullas, here's a blog post that shares 50 ways to make your company's blog rock. Among them are: ask questions, use StumbleUpon or AllTop to increase your readership, develop "how-to" blog posts (and turn them into short videos) and be yourself. (Spin Sucks)

The Plague of Journalism and Falsification: This is a call for journalists and PR professionals to "aspire to the 'better angels of our [collective] nature' and put an end to plagiarizing and falsification once and for all." The recent string of plagiarism is a reminder that the "us vs. them" argument between journalists and PR pros is too often based on the assumption that journalists consistently take the moral high road in a vacuum devoid of agendas. It's also gives both sides of the debate a chance to distinguish between inspiration from different sources and plagiarism. (MediaPost Publications – Marketing Daily)

The Struggle for Alternative Weeklies: The Village Voice is an example of an alternative weekly that set out to oppose daily newspapers in its market, only to struggle because of the Web. Everything alternative weeklies offer is now available on the Web in digitized and democratized form, making those alternative publications look dull in comparison. However, smaller weeklies in smaller markets seem to be doing better. (NYTimes.com)

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