Media Coverage: E-Mail Interviews, Wikipedia Use, Online Pulitzers, and Rumors

While none of it's specific to education reporting, the trio of Romenesko posts earlier this week proves too difficult to resist.

First, a link to the CJR discusses journalists' increasing reliance on email interviews, and their potential (though not catastrophic) perils -- each of which I eagerly await rather than play interminable games of phone tag or be forced to surf the Internet to keep awake during interviews with blowhards or talking point-trons: Some say reporters rely too much on e-mail interviews.

Next, an Onion-worthy headline in which a Times editor has to tell his staff not to use Wikipedia, the amazing but highly questionable interactive/collective "open source" encyclopedia: NYT biz editor tells staff not to use Wikipedia to check info. Some Wiki-philes may disagree, but to me having to do that is akin to telling reporters not to get their information off bathroom walls.

Last and probably least in the Romenesko troika: apparently now you can get extra credit for your Pulitzer submissions for online material: Online material can now be used to bolster Pulitzer entries. But, just in case, you probably better submit to EWA as well.

Over at NPR, there's an interesting piece about whatever happened to all the reports of shootings and mayhem in New Orleans that turned out to be untrue, or at least unverifiable. I'm still waiting for the education version of that, but I'm sure it's out there. Anatomy of a Rumor NPR