Reading Around on August 24th through August 25th

A few interesting links collected August 24th through August 25th:

• Guampedia: Get Involved – Guampedia, Guam’s online encyclopedia, is striving to help preserve and promote Guam’s history and culture and help educate children, residents and visitors alike … but we need your help.
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• Paragraphs! – Back in the days of old, when men were men and computers didn’t yet rule the earth, stories couldn’t be edited merely by hitting the delete key a few times. So when copy needed to be cut to fill a particular space, it was convenient for every sentence to be its own paragraph. That way, you could cut any single sentence you wanted, join up the copy, and you were done. You always knew exactly how many lines you were saving and it was simple to make the cut without resetting the entire piece.

  Electronic typesetting makes this unnecessary, of course, but there’s another advantage to this custom: it adds a bit of white space to the page. Newspapers that don’t do this end up looking gray and intimidating. So the custom stays.

• Radley Balko Comments on CNN’s Unattributed Use of His Reporting – City Desk – Washington City Paper – CNN recently did to criminal justice reporter Radley Balko, who lives in Northern Virginia, what Gawker supposedly did to Shapira, except it failed to give any credit where much credit was due.
  Balko (who I worked with at Reason) has spent several years reporting on Steven Hayne, the Mississippi medical examiner whose shoddy work has led to the incarceration of several known innocents. Over the last three years, Balko has cultivated sources, reads hundreds–if not thousands–of pages of documentation incriminating Hayne, and, as a result, has broken every single piece of major news about the medical examiner.

  But you wouldn’t know any of that if all you had for reference was the AC360 special about Hayne, which piggy-backs almost exclusively on Balko’s reporting without every hat-tipping or acknowledging his work. (Techdirt reported that “sources quoted by CNN told Balko that CNN claims it found them via his articles.”)