The Associated Press reports that Whipple died on Sunday, March 17 from Pneumonia.

Whipple is, perhaps, best known for his work as a Pentagon correspondent for Life magazine during World War II. He was instrumental in pressuring the U.S. military to allow the publication of a photograph of dead U.S. soldiers. Whipple pressured war censors for the clearance, eventually getting the attention of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who allowed the publication of the image. The AP states that the event ended the censorship rule against publishing photos of dead soldiers.

After the war, Whipple continued to report for Life and began writing books, most of them about sailing and seafaring. Throughout his career, Whipple authored more than 20 workss, such as Vintage Nantucket, The Whalers, and The Mysterious voyage of Captain Kidd.

Whipple went on to become an executive editor at Time-Life Books.

According to an Associated Press report, Karnow died in his sleep on January 27 at his home in Potomac, Maryland. Karnow died of congestive heart failure.

Karnow served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II before beginning his career as a reporter. He soon after began reporting for Time, and briefly served as the magazine’s North African Bureau chief. Starting in 1959, Karnow became Time‘s Asia correspondent. He was present during the first American deaths in Vietnam that year.

Karnow covered the war until its end in 1974. His reports were eventually used to write his most famous book, Vietnam: A History. In addition to that definitive take on the Vietnam conflict, Karnow authored several other books such as In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines and Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution.

As recently as the year 2000, Karnow wrote a piece on the Vietnam War for Salon, calling the war ” a tragedy of epic dimensions for the United States as well as for Vietnam, where at least 3 million people, both soldiers and civilians, lost their lives.” Karnow was writing against modern arguments that sought to portray the Vietnam conflict as just and winnable.

Other recent author talks include: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, Jose Garces, Cal Newport, and Andrew Blum. You can find them all here.

New York native Malcome Browne attended the quaker school of Friends Seminary during his youth, and then attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, earning a degree in Chemistry.

After college, Browne was drafted for the Korean War. During his service, Browne was assigned to the pacific edition of the Stars and Stripes newspaper, and worked as a journalist for the newspaper for two years. After his assignment at the newspaper, Browne joined the Associated Press, and later was assigned to the Indochina division as a chief correspondent. During his tenure at the Associated Press, Browne received a Pulitzer-prize for his journalism skills, and then left the Associated Press in 1965.

In 1968, Browne joined the New York Times and later became their correspondent for South America. During his time at the New York Times, Browne also covered the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

On Monday, August 27th, 2012, Malcome Browne passed away due to complications with Parkinson’s Disease at the age of 81.

The Center for Investigative Reporting summarizes its view of the conference on its site:

Investigative reporting will always be a necessity in society. As we move into the future, technology and muckraking will be intertwined. Reporters will need to know how technology can help their reporting and the presentation of their work to the public. Technologists will will need to understand the art of storytelling in the public interest. Our fates are joined.

Problems and opportunities abound in this space. We believe that through communication and mutual education, we can form a more perfect union between these two crafts.

The invite-only conference has a day-long schedule, featuring talks from journalists and engineers. Events at the conference can be followed on the Center For Investigative Reporting’s Google+ page. An early panel discussion took place with California Watch, the Los Angeles Times, and Bradford Cross, co-founder of FlightCaster. Seminars were held on topics as diverse as using “Hackerspace,” global entrepreneurship, experimental filmmaking, and “Tacogate.”

One of the highlights of the conference was a Google+ Hangout featuring journalists from around the world. Guests in the Hangout included Sree Sreenivasan, Dean of Student Affairs for Columbia’s Journalism School; Amna Nawaz, NBC News’ Pakistan bureau chief; Nic Robertson, CNN International senior correspondent; Sarah Hill, news anchor for an NBC affiliate in the midwest; and Krishna Bharat, founder of Google News.

I don’t know what Google or the Center for Investigative Reporting hope will come from the conference, but I’m glad it’s happening. Journalism, whatever we take it to be, is changing faster than any business model can keep up with. And with reporting and data-gathering happening nearly as fast (or faster) than news can be read, technology will be required to help parse the never-ending stream of information.

“Facebook asked me to pass this on to you. They require it of all visitors to their facilities. It only applies to things that you might accidentally stumble upon while you are there and covers nothing discussed during our news conference. Please either bring a signed copy or be ready to sign upon arrival.”

Journalists were a little upset needless to say, giving that their journalistic freedom was being, for lack of a better term, stolen. Journalists then got a little pep in their step as two hours later another e-mail was sent to agencies from Sarah Lane, the AG’s Director of New Media, stating.

“I’m writing on behalf of Dan Sytman. You may disregard the nondisclosure agreement that we sent earlier.”

So you may be curious as to what the agreement may have said. Well, partly it entailed:

“You may become aware of non-public information related to Facebook and its products, services, programs, features, data, techniques, technology, code, ideas, inventions, research, testing, methods, procedures, know-how, trade secrets, business and financial information and other activities through disclosure, observation or otherwise in the course of your visit … All Facebook Confidential Information remains the property of Facebook. You agree not to disclose any Facebook Confidential Information to any third party, and to take all reasonable precautions to prevent its unauthorized dissemination …”

The full agreement can be seen below.

If you were a journalist or if you are a journalist, how does this information make you feel? Do you feel it’s right, whether it’s legal or not, to ask journalists and media to pretty much forget what they see? We want to know what you think, leave us comments below.

You like Google+ because of the ability to create circles and separate out the elements of your life? Facebook saw that and emulated it quickly with Lists.

You like Twitter because people can follow you without there having to be a “relationship” there”? Fine. Facebook launched Subscriptions.

And, it is Subscriptions that has become very attractive to journalists. Facebook has announced that thousands of journalists now use the subscription feature to promote their writing.

Rather than create a Facebook “Page” (not the same as a Profile), journalists can now keep their regular profiles but allow people to subscribe to their feeds. All the pictures and other Timeline info remains between you and your Facebook friends (or those you specify in security settings). Items you wish your subscribers to see can go out to an unlimited number of people.

Which is one of the big differences between accepting friends vs subscribers on Facebook. You are limited to 5,000 friends on Facebook But, there is no limit to subscribers.

There are still advantages to creating a Page on Facebook. There are customizations and tabs that Profiles don’t get. Anyone can “Like” your Page and get the same info as a subscriber would. And, you can assign multiple admins to a Page.

The differences in terminology about Pages vs Profiles, and who lis allowed to do what under Facebook’s Terms of Service, can get twisty. Facebook has several help pages to walk you through it all.

One about Subscribing in general.

One about Pages.

Subscribing vs Pages.

Subscribing for Journalists.

While anyone can use the Subscription feature, Facebook is taking its Subscribing for Journalists seriously. They have dedicated a whole program to just that demographic. In the past, journalists have been very keen on Twitter for releasing things. Facebook hopes to chip away at that market with its Subscription feature.

I don’t know that a stock image bank reflects society’s opinions on bloggers and journalism, but I found the search results amusing, and thought it would be fun to share.

If you search “blog,” “blogging,” or “blogger” you get these results:

That’s it. Really. That’s literally every result that comes up.

For “journalist,” there are seven pages of photos. I’m not going to include them all, but here is a sampling:

So, what are the takeaways here?

Bloggers are basically teenage girls with computers. Journalists don’t use computers. They use typewriters, paper, or appear on TV.

I guess the line between blogger and journalist isn’t so gray after all.

Last year, the AP Stylebook added a bunch of new social media guidelines to their rules for journalists. Among those guidelines was a change from “web site” to “website,” hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend, and follow to be used as verbs.

They also added social media terms “trending,” “retweet” and “unfriend” to the Stylebook. The latter settling the debate once and for all that “unfriend” is more acceptable than “defriend.”

In March, the AP added some notable tech terms to their online edition of the Stylebook. They decided to officially go with “email” as opposed to “e-mail” and they took the spaces out of “cellphone” and “smartphone,” making them one word entities on their own.

In the newly revised 2011 print edition, the AP has added some more social media / tech terms to the Stylebook. Among them – geolocation, geotagging, link shortener, stream and unfollow. I’ve been guilty of hyphenating geo-location in the past, so I’m now glad to have one less character to deal with. They announced these changes via Twitter last night:

As I said before, tech word additions aren’t the focus of the fully revised Stylebook. The focus is food. FYI, the AP added words such as locavore as the preferred term for a person who strives to eat locally and “blind bake” to describe the action of baking a pie crust before filling it. They also added “huitlacoche,” a fungus also known as “corn smut” that grows on corn and is considered a delicacy in Mexico. Mmmmm…corn smut.

But the addition of these new terms continues the integration of our fourth estate with the wonderful word of social media.

[Image Courtesy]

More WebProNews Videos

You can put out press releases and just sit there and hope your stories get picked up and/or read by customers, but it helps if you optimize them for those who are most likely to be interested.

Nida Haque, Marketing Manager of PRWeb spoke with WebProNews recently about press release optimization. "Do your keyword research," she says. "Don’t use words that are just on your website. Do the searching before it and see what people are searching for."

"Be a little creative," she adds. "See what’s happening in the season." She cites Black Friday as an example. A lot of people are searching for Black Friday deals ahead of Thanksgiving, which presents opportunities to take advantage of that from within press releases, because press releases can be pretty powerful for search. 

Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group told us, "It used to be with public relations that we were reaching out to the journalists with a press release and trying to get the journalist to do the story, and now with the optimization and the online opportunities with press releases we can actually reach our targets direct by optimizing our press releases and releasing them on the search engines, and then using social media to even get more exposure." 

She also shared some thoughts on the added value press releases can get from Twitter. "You can use Twitter…as part of your PR program, as part of your news feed, so Twitter is like basically…we all know it’s 140 characters so it’s like putting out little nuggets of news via Twitter, so if you take your press release and kind of chop it up into four or five different sound bytes, and then put those out…over the Twitter news feed each day…" 

Of course press releases aren’t just about search and social media traffic. You want press. You want journalists and bloggers to pick up stories and really get them spread around. Well there are ways to get them to pay attention more. First, obviously, you need an interesting product or announcement, but it also helps if you give the blogger/journlist something else to latch onto. A lot of details help, but so do visuals. 

"48% are more attracted to video news releases or image news releases than just your standard kind of text-only news releases, so that will definitely help a lot," says Haque, who notes that using multimedia in press releases also increases the time spent on page by an average of 30 seconds when it comes to customers viewing the release themselves. 

Lee Odden of TopRank marketing had some good advice on getting releases in front of journalists in another interview with WebProNews earlier this year. He says to look at what it is you can do as a marketer to make it easier for the journalist to do their job. Optimize your content for what a journalist is looking for.