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

A Journalist's Guide to Reddit: Last Wednesday, President Obama took part in an AMA ("Ask Me Anything") on Reddit. (For the uninitiated, an AMA is "an open Q&A thread where one notable person answers questions from everyone else.") While Reddit didn't need the president's participation to establish its legitimacy, it's a call to journalists to start paying attention to a site that's becoming increasingly mainstream and culturally relevant. However, getting acclimated to the world of Reddit takes some education. This guide covers basic things like subreddits, the site's stance on self-promotional links and its broader definition of news. (Poynter)

Tips for Earning Respect in the PR Industry: Capable, young PR professionals are often given big responsibilities that come with a lot of pressure to perform, but respect is not always part of this package. Among the 10 tips included here for earning respect in the PR industry are to dress like an adult, balance causal banter with a serious demeanor and act as your own PR agent. (PR Daily)

Twitter and Political Journalism: Twitter has changed the game of political journalism, but is that good or bad? Controversial remarks spread much quicker than they did four years ago, pressuring campaigns to respond faster. On the other hand, Twitter and other social networks allow people to defuse incorrect or silly reports faster. The consequences of sources being able to "go direct" will be more apparent as the election draws closer. (GigaOM)

Traditional Journalism Is Connected to News via Social Media: Eric Carvin, social media editor at the Associated Press (AP), doesn't see it as "traditional journalism versus news over social media." Rather, he sees the two sides as connected, with social media providing up-to-the-minute information, and journalists verifying that information and putting it in a bigger context. Carvin also notes that social media can create closer ties between journalists and readers. His goal is for all of AP's 2,500 journalists to use social media well, not just to promote stories but to make stories better. (The Content Strategist)

Mobile Users Prefer News From Trusted Mainstream News Sites: According to the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute's "2012 Media News Consumption Survey," 61.8 percent of mobile users prefer news stories produced by professional journalists. However, 30.6 percent of respondents said they don't trust the mainstream media. (Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute)

More Than 20 Percent of U.S. Newspapers Have Online Pay Walls: More than one in five U.S. newspapers have now put up pay walls requiring subscriptions for full online access to content. According to News&Tech, the number of papers with some form of metered pay walls or digital subscription plans has doubled since last year. (Mashable)

Thirty-Five Nuggets of PR Advice: "Public Relations is a marathon, and not a sprint." That was the best bit of public relations advice this PR professional received when he was fresh out of college. What advice do other PR practitioners want to pass on to the next generation of professionals in their field? Among the 35 bits of advice included in this post are: "Media/PR world is a small world, so don’t burn any bridges"; "When you walk into a meeting with a client, say one smart thing and ask one smart question"; and "Tell the truth faster." (fresh as.... A Mynt Public Relations Blog)

Fact-Checking and the Media's Crisis of Confidence: Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention brought a question to the minds of journalists and commentators: "Can the media stop politicians from misleading the public?" Journalists should remember to remind readers of bogus claims and cover a pattern of false claims as an ongoing story. They should also remember that whenever someone who could be the next president or vice president of the nation makes a false claim, it's always worth honoring their duty to truth, not the marketplace or people they cover. (Columbia Journalism Review)

How the Desert News Supports a Local Newsroom With a National Strategy: Here's a look at how Salt Lake City's Desert News is approaching the challenge facing most American metropolitan newspapers: "A local web audience isn’t large enough to support the newsroom, but a national audience can get national news from anywhere." The Desert News is faring well, as its digital revenue grew at more than 50 percent annually for the past three years and now accounts for more than a quarter of total revenue. The core of its success is an editorial strategy that focuses on issues not sufficiently covered by other news organizations and a digital unit that comes up with Web-only products. (Nieman Journalism Lab)

Ten Reasons Why I Hate Social Media: This social media coordinator and graphic designer shares 10 reasons why she hates social media. "Because I’m so immersed in it, occasionally there are things about it that make me want to throw staplers across the room in hopes that a rogue staple will somehow fly out and hit someone in the eye." Among the reasons are: typos/grammatical errors, the fleeting nature of content and the difficulty of proving ROI. (The Abbi Agency)

ProfNet, a service of PR Newswire, has helped journalists and experts connect since 1992. Writers can search the ProfNet Connect database of more than 50,000 profiles; send a ProfNet query by email to thousands of subscribers around the globe; or get timely experts and story ideas by email.

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)

ProfNet, a service of PR Newswire, has helped journalists and experts connect since 1992. Writers can search the ProfNet Connect database of more than 50,000 profiles; send a ProfNet query by email to thousands of subscribers around the globe; or get timely experts and story ideas by email.

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

PR Pros Aren't Keeping up With Journalists' Expectations: According to the TEKGroup Online Newsroom Survey, 80 percent of journalists and bloggers value images, while 75 percent want video. But according to a PRESSFeed survey, just 4 percent of PR pros think images are important to journalists, while 8 percent said including a video gallery is important to journalists. The PR industry isn't keeping up with what journalists want. (Spin Sucks)

Major News Organizations Are Less Credible: According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, positive believability ratings have fallen for 9 of 13 news organizations studied. "The falloff in credibility affects news organizations in most sectors: national newspapers, such as the New York Times and USA Today, all three cable news outlets, as well as the broadcast TV networks and NPR." For all 13 news organizations, the average positive believability rating is 56 percent, which is down from 62 percent in 2012 and down even further from 71 percent in 2002. (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press)

Illinois Judge Dismisses Case, Upholding Media Shield Laws for Bloggers: A judge in Cook County, Ill., overturned his original ruling against technology site TechnoBuffalo, which is a good sign for online publications. The ruling, which dealt with TechnoBuffalo keeping a tipster's identity anonymous, means that the website is protected under Illinois shield law, marking the first time a blog was able to successfully argue for protection traditionally given to "old media." (The Verge, Chicago Tribune)

Magazines Have a Bundling Problem: A big part of the problem magazine publishers are having in this age of new media is their misidentification of their problems. They're "striving to find new ways to distribute their packages without acknowledging that those very packages are fast becoming relics, a testament to a time past, when publishers had the power of platform and could demand that readers come to them." Magazines have to shift toward being leaner, producing strong content that can be easily shared, purchased, and moved beyond pages and apps. They must accept that they won't be the ones determining the mode of delivery, and know who their new competition will be. (PandoDaily)

PR Is Still About People: Despite the emergence of social media platforms, where public relations pros now do much of their communication, it's important not to forget that on the other end of those digital interactions sits a human being. "People make public relations programs a reality. People make a business successful. No matter how sophisticated the message or the means of communication… 'It’s still about the people.'" (Waxing UnLyrical)

Homicide Watch D.C. Hopes to Stay Alive With a Kickstarter Campaign: The Internet has enabled anyone to become a publisher that holds people's attention the same way large media companies do. But large companies are built for sustainability, something that doesn't always come easily for smaller companies. This is a lesson crime reporting website Homicide Watch D.C. is learning. After a licensing deal with a local news organization fell through at the last minute, the company has turned to a Kickstarter campaign to stay afloat. (Nieman Journalism Lab)

Four Types of FOIAs and How Journalists Should Use Them: Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests is like "getting a peek at your kid sister’s diary, if your kid sister just misappropriated government funding and/or covered up a professional scandal." The four types of FOIAs are: the lock, the R.I.P., the wild card, and the FOIA of the FOIA'ers. There's a lot a journalist can do once they accept that their job grants them a look at other people's secrets without penalties. (Poynter)

Why Reporters Should Love PR Pros: Some members of the media might truly dislike PR professionals, but this shouldn't be the case. Among the eight reasons given here for why reporters should love PR pros are: PR pros serve reporters, PR pros are nice to reporters even when they're treated like crap and PR pros keep reporters informed. (PR Daily)

The Wrong Way to Do Blogger Relations: Behold this terrible email pitch. Here's why it's so bad: it used spray-and-pray tactics, it doesn't offer a call to action, it came from a Gmail account and it's an opt-out message. "This really is the worst kind of PR -- the kind that actually makes me angry about people who claim to work in the same space as me." (Dave Fleet)

English News for Latinos: Univision and ABC News are teaming up to create a new network for Hispanics who prefer to get their news in English. ABC News is trying to shift its newsroom culture, going so far as to offer its staffers free Spanish lessons. Still, the new network, set to debut in the second quarter of next year, isn't a guaranteed success. (NPR)

ProfNet, a service of PR Newswire, has helped journalists and experts connect since 1992. Writers can search the ProfNet Connect database of more than 50,000 profiles; send a ProfNet query by email to thousands of subscribers around the globe; or get timely experts and story ideas by email.

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

Twitter Bans a Journalist Who Criticized NBC's Olympics Coverage and Shared an Email Address: Guy Adams, the Los Angeles Bureau chief for The Independent, took to Twitter to voice his displeasure with the way NBC was covering the Olympics. He went so far as to tweet the corporate email address of an NBC executive, and that's when Twitter suspended his account for violating its policy of sharing the "private and confidential information of others." NBC filed the complaint that got Adams' account suspended, a move that received much criticism. Twitter reinstated Adams' account about two days later, but it did little to address the bigger issues at hand. "The company has yet to properly address growing suspicions that its decision to suspend my account was motivated by a business relationship with NBC. The firms are running a cross-promotion throughout the Olympics. Was that why it chose to ignore its own rules?" (Village Voice, Deadspin, The Independent)

Twitter's Fail and the Economics of Trust: Twitter's suspension of Guy Adams' account could be a defining moment for the company for all the wrong reasons. The company has to learn what newspapers did when they began to accept advertising: "that when trust is your asset, you must run your service and your business according to principles of trust." Twitter needs a wall between itself and its sponsors, or else it will lose trust and value. (BuzzMachine)

The Internet and the Shortening Life Span of a Plagiarist: Jonah Lehrer's recent resignation from The New Yorker after admitting that he made up quotes from Bob Dylan in his recent book has an interesting side plot: "Is it possible that the lifespan of a plagiarist is getting shorter?" The Internet may be making it easier to bust these kinds of offenses quicker. We could be witnessing the beginning of a new era of fact-checking. (The Atlantic Wire)

PR Lessons From Plagiarism Scandals: The Jonah Lehrer scandal is just one of a series of recent transgressions committed by members of the media. In these incidents are lessons for PR professionals, including: tell your clients that the vetting process for reporting might not be as stringent as it used to be, younger reporters are being thrust into the spotlight earlier than before and expect more corrections. (PR Daily)

Public Relations Is About Human Relations, Not Fake Familiarity: It's apparent that public relations firms are spending plenty of time, money and resources on getting away from the "spray and pray" way of sending pitches in order to get better at knowing their target market. Nevertheless, pitches are worse than they were before. Pitches are now falling somewhere in between those two methods – a slightly personalized message from an individual that you don't know. "And so, it turns out that faking familiarity has an air of creepiness that is somewhat more disturbing than the spam that came before it." Social media is meant to be used to connect to other humans, not manipulate them. (Six Pixels of Separation – The Blog)

Five Ways to Tweet Breaking News: Tweeting news involves volume, frequency and serendipity. "The combo deals a particular blow, however, when your latest tweet contains your big, hot breaking story." So what's the best way to tweet big news in order to get the clicks and engagement you want? Here are five possible ways to go: 1) ALL-CAPS; 2) #ALL-CAPS; 3) classic; 4) no distinction; and 5) retweet another account dedicated to big, breaking news. (Mediabistro's 10,000 Words)

Ten Lessons From Two Years of Blogging: Brad Phillips, the man behind the Mr. Media Training blog, recently celebrated his site's second anniversary. He shared 10 lessons from his two years of blogging. They include: daily blogging makes your work-life balance difficult; the hard work begins after you've written the obvious posts; and some people will steal your content without attribution. (Mr. Media Training)

How Journalists Verify User-Generated Content and Info Found From Social Media: Nieman Reports recently included a cover package titled "Truth in the Age of Social Media," which focuses on the "craft of verification." Included in the story is input from Chris Hamilton, BBC's social media editor, who says while correspondents and producers are honing their verification skills, there will always be a place for verification specialists, if only for efficiency. (Poynter)

Five PR Lessons From the Chick-fil-A Crisis: When Chick-fil-A president and COO Dan Cathy made comments about the company's stance on gay marriage, he committed at least five cardinal PR sins. Among them were: if you don't want to see it, hear it or read it, don't say it; have internal and external brand ambassadors ready; and never surprise your employees. (Inc.com)

The Top 52 PR Pros on Twitter: This list of the top 52 PR professionals on Twitter is up-to-date and based on unscientific criteria, including: they must be active on Twitter for at least six months; they must participate in the conversation and offers/adds/shares value; and their primary job is public relations or communications. Included on the list (which is compiled in alphabetical order) are @allanschoenberg, @davesaunders, @keithtrivitt, @markwschaefer and @valeriesimon. (CloudSpark)

ProfNet, a service of PR Newswire, has helped journalists and experts connect since 1992. Writers can search the ProfNet Connect database of more than 50,000 profiles; send a ProfNet query by email to thousands of subscribers around the globe; or get timely experts and story ideas by email.

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

USA Today’s ‘Ohno’ Moment With Subway: Journalism can’t survive without advertising, but something USA Today did last week went too far in blurring the line between the two realms. An interview with eight-time Olympic medal-winning speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno was featured on the front page of USA Today’s sports section. However, the story was placed in between two prominent ads, one right in the header next to the paper’s logo. “So to recap: An exclusive interview is completely sandwiched (pardon the pun) between two Subway ads, both of which feature the subject of USA Today's exclusive interview. Is this okay?” According to this former USA Today reporter, no – it’s a dubious step. (International Business Times)

Six Ways Journalists Can Effectively and Ethically Use Press Releases: A lawsuit against the Kansas City Star spotlights how journalists should be using press releases. The consensus suggests that newsrooms would benefit from talking about how to properly use press releases. Among the six tips offered by this editor are to think of press releases as a good starting point for finding out about information you didn’t know; reporters should talk with their editors about how to paraphrase/quote from press releases; and read press releases with a skeptical eye. (Poynter)

Chick-fil-A Lays a Rotten PR Egg: Chick-fil-A got itself in a public relations mess after its president and COO made comments related to the company’s stance on same-sex marriage. The fallout included a harsh letter from Boston’s mayor and the end of the Jim Henson Company’s relationship with the fast-food company. To make things worse, Chick-fil-A appeared to have created fake Facebook accounts to defend itself, though the company denies it did so. The lesson is obvious: Social media is a place where you can engage with your customers, but when you try to alienate people and lie to defend your position, you won’t get away with it. (Spin Sucks)

The Media’s Race to Be Worst: “The only thing missing from the mega-coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act last month was proper credit to the journalist who first broke the story,” writes columnist Gene Weingarten. “That journalist was me.” Weingarten shares how he tweeted “SCOTUS AFFIRMS ACA” at 10 a.m. on June 28, seven minutes and 35 seconds before anyone else reported the decision. He accomplished this feat by guessing. The old newspaper byword “Late But Great” seems to be replaced by “Worst But First,” according to Weingarten. Alexis Ohanian, co-creator of Reddit, also laments the media’s race to be first, saying though the Internet and other tools will always win on speed, journalism is meant to give us what’s accurate. (National Post, CBS News)

How to Write Eye-Catching News Release Subject Lines: “You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly judge the effectiveness of an e-mailed news release by its subject line.” Here are six tips to help you write attention-grabbing subject lines for news releases: 1) get inspiration from journalists, 2) emphasize the benefits, 3) don’t manipulate the recipient, 4) be concise, 5) don’t exaggerate and 6) don’t use spammy words. (PR News)

Advice for the Next Generation of PR Pros: Dear college students or recent college graduates: PR is not glamorous. In fact, PR is often thankless and stressful. Luck can’t be counted on, so the job demands coming up with plans of attack, ones that focus on the brand and the consumers. The next generation of PR pros should heed six pieces of advice, including: be prepared to work your butt off with little pay, be prepared to receive little respect from journalists and clients (until you’ve earned it), and be prepared to feel proud when you see the positive impact you make for a company. (PR Daily)

Forty-Four Percent of Americans Learned About the Colorado Shootings From TV: According to CJ&N, a media industry research and analysis company, 56 percent of Americans said they heard about the shootings in the Aurora, Colo., theater from a source other than TV news. While this means 44 percent of Americans heard about it from TV news, 14 percent said they heard about the news from websites and 13 percent from radio. “Some of the ‘new’ digital channels many think would be prominent as the first to inform were not. Facebook, text alerts, email, and Twitter were all named by 5% or less of the total sample.” Younger age groups were almost as likely to have heard about the news via word-of-mouth and Facebook as by TV. (CJ&N Blog)

‘Crowdsourced’ Journalism Is Flawed, too: Citizen journalism was on full display in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo., move theater shooting. The crowdsourced news that resulted received praise, and its potential to bring benefits that mainstream journalism can’t provide was hailed. But here’s the thing: Citizen journalism is pretty much doing the same exact thing that traditional journalism has always done. “Crowdsourced journalism doesn’t seem to do long-term investigative journalism well, nor does it do well at identifying and tracing large-scale societal problems, or high-level analyses of medical, scientific or financial news, the kind of things that require expertise. Instead, it’s really good at breaking news about shootings and war, the same ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ coverage that the media is frequently criticized for overemphasizing.” Citizen journalism is nice and all, but it has its share of major flaws, and praising it for being something superior to what the mainstream media gives us is mistaken. (Salon.com)

Can PR Save the Penn State Brand?: While it remains to be seen whether or not the Penn State brand can be saved, one thing’s already clear: PR has already played a key role in diverting attention away from the university’s child-abuse scandal and to the larger issue of big football programs. Nevertheless, business partners don’t appear to be offering their full support just yet. Penn State could have been more proactive by implementing self-imposed sanctions before the NCAA took action. Going forward, the university should focus on telling the stories of students and alumni doing great things. (AdAge.com)

BuzzFeed Wants to Reinvent Wire Stories for Social Media: “The wire story is an atomic element of news: It’s the basic material upon which more journalism can be built. But wire stories, as a compact unit for getting out the basics of an updating story, are also a commodity.” When major news breaks, readers are often inundated with the same story, thanks to the speed and excess number of channels we use to access news. This is also a point of frustration for editors like BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, who wants to experiment with a new model for wire stories in the era of social media. (Nieman Journalism Lab)

ProfNet, a service of PR Newswire, has helped journalists and experts connect since 1992. Writers can search the ProfNet Connect database of more than 50,000 profiles; send a ProfNet query by email to thousands of subscribers around the globe; or get timely experts and story ideas by email.