http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/business/media/war-on-leaks-is-pitting-journalist-vs-journalist.html
I read this August column on whistleblowers vs. journalists, and the distinction struck me as interesting. Is there a legitimate difference between whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden and conventional journalists, or do we hurt journalism as a whole by turning against ourselves?

I expected this article to be about transgender bathrooms at Redwood, something that came up repeatedly when I was writing the Tenaya feature, so I was surprised when that way more important issue, in which Redwood has taken a leading role, didn't come up at all. I understand the point being made here, but I agree with Mae that it seems a little ridiculous to provide coverage to a pretty weak viewpoint when a much more important one is so literally close at hand.

Interesting combination of reporting on something that actually happened and sensationalizing it for viewership. It would be interesting for us to try some balance of this-opinions on news stories in this shorter format would probably increase readership, especially on some less grabbing topics, but I wonder if there's a way to do this kind of coverage more seriously. Most of our op/ed stories tend to be about wider issues affecting society at large or super micro issues affecting individual Tam News reporters, maybe we could try to do some op/ed stories about the kind of things we cover in news-local stories affecting more than just one person in the Tam community.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/swedish-cinemas-bechdel-test-films-gender-bias
In light of Bella's most recent column, I found this article interesting. Should the United States take similar steps to inform the public about gender bias in movies and media? Is the Bechdel test a good metric for gender bias?

Chronicled in this post is Cody Brown's ongoing battle with the New York Times following Brown's creation of a program which would allow users to generate Snow Fall-esque digital layouts at a fraction of the time and effort. Who do you think is right here?
https://medium.com/meta/503b9c22080b/

I think multimedia or interactive elements would definitely be a good way for The Tam News to expand, especially because we're in a kind of unique position where many of our readers are part of our stories. So if we have a feature that quotes or focuses on some students, maybe the online version of the feature could include photo galleries of pictures from students, or audio/video from them. If we advertise this in the print magazine it could drive more traffic to the site. Although "Snow Fall" includes a lot of high-tech features (or so they seem to me), I think we could enhance online stories and interest readers fairly easily with simpler multimedia efforts. Certainly having these added features would encourage readers to stick with wordier pieces; the interesting but long election feature comes to mind-if we had had some interactive info graphics or pictures/videos of student opinions online, students might have been more engaged.

As someone who worked on editing the story and making the call to go ahead and publish it despite knowing that the situation was still changing, I think situations like this can be really tricky but I do think we made the right call. Following the initial discussion about TEAM's possible discontinuation/discussion about discussion about discontinuation, there were a lot of rumors and a lot of concern flying around. I think it was important that we attempted to address that immediately, especially in the print issue which went to press before we had the board meeting results. In situations where we can at least describe a conflict that affects students, like this one, I think we should, even if we don't have information on how that conflict is being resolved. It's part of our job as informers to the student body to get the latest information on this kind of situation to students, and I think in this case it was important to get that information out quickly because there was a lot of confusion about the situation. But we also definitely need to acknowledge the fact that the situation is subject to change and that we may not have all of the information.