Hey Newsifiers,

Rather than respond to all the threads separately, thought I would take a moment to lay out all the open issues here. If I miss any, please accommodate by commenting to this.

1. On February 3rd, 2007, DIG THE HEAVY says:Question.......Is it ok to put your own original headline on a republished story. I see it all the time where you have the same content but another publication will have a different headline.

Highlight tries to import the original headline but often they are dull or irrelevant. Writing a headline can be a lot of fun, and take some effort. My sense is we want to encourage originality.

2.On February 2nd, 2007, killfile says
: I continue to wonder what NPs policy is on content republishing. Fair Use does allow the partial reproduction of materials, but I would hesitate to say that it allows me to copy an entire article from the NYT and publish it to NP.

We just had a perfect illustration with a posting of one of our members who had quoted an entire article from Stars & Stripes magazine (www.stipes.com). We received the typical cease & desist, which we complied with immediately by truncating the article. This is a major issue as far as I am concerned and we need to deal with it. One solution, as I discussed before, would be to limit the number of words that can be captured by our HL tool; the other is to replace the "Quote" window with a blank text box where people would have to write their own header to the quoted material. But I am very open to suggestions.

3. On February 2nd, 2007, publicreader responded to MattE thusly::

Do we need another category in the editorial bubble for this (discouraging people from posting quotes with no original material) ? Inauthentic and incomplete have meanings other than the ones I think we might wish to convey.. something like "Great story but ..."?

Thanks to all of your efforts, we are discovering the inadequacies of our "trust marking" system. I think we do need another option in the flag bubble, something that is less harsh than inauthentic or incomplete, more learning-oriented. Your suggestions will be gratefully accepted.

4. On February 2nd, 2007, matte says:

What is boils down to, I think, is a need to go back and review the whole interaction NP has with contributors - review and rewrite a lot of the 'what we are about' stuff and maybe even push people towards some tutorials on how to write a news story, and how what they are reading now can be integrated into it.

Agree. We do have some tutorial material - click on the Code of Conduct link at the bottom of the page and you'll find some Journalism Tips there.

We are working on a new flagging system right now that will give all editors instant access to our "knowledge base" - so you can essentially instantly paste in suggestions, etc. As this redesign goes on I will copy here the discussions we're having with our Development Team.