I don't how many times non-journalism students in my classes complained that using the rules of writing for journalists is unfair and not necessary for them.

My basic response is that writing is meant to communicate. And one cannot communicate well unless one is concise and precise.

To me "concise and precise" means stripping away the passive voice structure, eliminated adverbs and writing in short declarative sentences. This has nothing to do with only journalism but has everything to do with good writing. 

And now the U.S. government -- that bastion of the run-on sentence, the passive voice and the obscure wording -- has decided to join the ranks of the good writing crowd thanks to the new Plain Writing Act.

Say what you mean: Government pushing plain English For example: Read more »

Always loved this movie.

Click here to see a YouTube clip of "How to run a newspaper."

And I trust that by now everyone knows that the reason we never see the faces of newsreel reporters tracking down Rosebud is because journalists are always supposed to be in the background. Faceless.

Storify is a great resource to assemble social media postings into a coherent story.

Andy Carvin of NPR has been in the forefront of working social media to tell the story of the Arab uprisings.

His latest example is a Storify posting that quickly debunked an assertion that Israeli arms were being used by the Libyan forces against the insurgency.

It is well worth a look for the story itself but also how Carvin was alerted to the story, how he fact-checked it and how he assembled it.

How to debunk a rumor.