Tuesday squibs

I’m taking a mid-day break from class prep to pass on an item or two of interest.

• Watch out for bylines! Angela Grant is building a mini-media empire, with the addition of four new contributors to her essential News Videographer site. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer blogger.
• Things we were told about online that were wrong. Steve Safran wanders back through the years to enumerate all the “crazy” ideas about the net that didn’t turn out that crazy after all.
• Eight ways to improve your online political coverage. Also from Steve, a piece from earlier this week that has some intriguing ideas for editors everywhere.
• As Ad Spending Declines For First Six Months Of ‘07, Online Ad Growth Slows Slightly: Report. This is overall ad spending, not specifically newspaper advertising. And the fact it’s down for the second straight quarter for the first time since 2001 may have some significance.
• Media Literacy: Can the Public Catch Up with Newspapers? Steve Klein at Poynter grapples with the distrust of online sources, particularly blogs, wikis and the like. As much as I’d like to see media literacy a required high school course, I’m not sure we need fret too much: just about everything that is now well-established on the ‘net was initially distrusted and earned its rep the old-fashioned way: delivering results over time.