Innovation in Advertising or Danger to Journalism?

As traditional advertising becomes less and less popular (for whatever reason), media organizations are experimenting with other forms of revenue generation, such as "sponsored content."

Sponsored content, such as this one for the upcoming Playstation 4, looks very similar to the usual editorial content. It is often labeled as sponsored content - this one says the story of from Sony Entertainment Network, a BuzzFeed Partner.

Is there a problem with advertisements looking like editorial content?

Or is this a brilliant new way for media organizations to raise cash?

Cherri Gregg: "People don't know what they don't know until we tell them."

When Cherri Gregg was a little kid, she always wanted to know what was going on before anyone else. And she was always going around telling people about what she discovered.

"I always dreamed of being a reporter," she said yesterday in class.

She got sidetracked though. After studying communications at Boston University, she earned her law degree from Howard University. Then she practiced intellectual property litigation for eight years. And she married a fellow lawyer, whom she met on her first day of law school.

"I didn't like it," Cherri said of being an attorney. "I didn't love it with the same passion that my husband did."

So she did some research on graduate schools and wound up at Temple. Immediately, she became involved with TUTV and she reported and anchored for Temple Update. She freelanced video packages for a Turkish news organization. She kicked ass in her classes, she developed contacts and sources and she built her demo tape.

"It's on you," she said. "You can't blame your professors if you don't succeed."

Halfway through her graduate studies at Temple, Cherri began working as a part-time reporter at KYW Newsradio. Her immediate supervisor is a Temple grad, as is the news director and most of the reporters (some of whom also teach at Temple). After completing her graduate program, Cherri went full-time at the station.

Last month, she covered the inauguration of Barack Obama. She watched Beyonce lip-sync from up close. She reports, writes, tweets, shoots images, packages video and creates podcasts while covering multiple stories every day.

"There's no chilling," she said. "It is fast-paced."

But she loves it.

"We get to be thought leaders," Cherri said. "People don't know what they don't know until we tell them."

Here are a few other things that stood out for me:

• Her reason for going into law is the same as why she became a journalist: "I want to give voice to people who can't speak for themselves."
• She thinks she'll go to television news at some point but she knows she has much to learn still.
• She believes in making strategies, figuring out what she needs to do to get to where she wants to be.
• She thinks you should make a strategy too.
• As a journalist, you have to be comfortable around all kinds of people.
• Be nice to everybody. Who knows where people will wind up, and you don't want to burn bridges.

What stood out for you?

Should The Media Make Deals With The Government?

The American military has been operating a secret base for drone aircrafts in Saudi Arabia, the New York Times revealed last week.

It turns out that some members of the American media, including the Times, knew about the base for about a year, and they knew about the operations taking place there because they had obtained copies of the document approving activities at the base. According to the Washington Post, the document concludes "the United States can lawfully kill one of its own citizens overseas if it determines that the person is a 'senior, operational leader' of al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates and poses an imminent threat."

The media had an informal agreement with the government not to reveal the details.

Should the Washington Post, New York Times and other news organizations have revealed the information when they first learned about it?

Is there a danger/problem with the media making deals with the government?

The Reporter And The Random Person: Is This Professional?

A Florida reporter was doing a live shot/preview package in New Orleans the day before the Super Bowl when a random person approached her and began talking.

Did the reporter handle this situation properly?

Recent Journo Grads Are Making Decent Money (And Other Odd Things You Learn On The Internet).

Oh, Internet. You'd think by now we'd know how to use you properly.

Then again, maybe there are new rules and the old conventions are obsolete. Who knows?

• The Lansing State Journal invited followers to "share" an image of a fatal car crash on facebook as a way of expressing condolences to the families of victims. Is there anything wrong with that?

• An activist group launched a campaign - online and on facebook - to save the two main daily newspapers in Philadelphia.

• A teacher in Colorado was suspended after she tweeted topless images of herself to Diplo. Philly.com ran the images on their website. Should Philly.com have published the images?

• There were 24.1 million tweets about the Super Bowl. Only 5.5 million of them were about Beyonce's halftime performance.

• AOL did a story about Penn State's hockey team. And AOL added the words "Jerry Sandusky" to the story URL. Some folks argued that was a blatant attempt at building better search engine optimization for the story. Is there anything wrong with that, if that was the case (which they deny)?

• A report says that 2012 college grads with full-time jobs in journalism had an average starting salary of more than $40,000 per year. This dude adds context to the claim.

Got any thoughts about any of this?