“If you can’t stomach the gore, don’t run the photo. Period,” wrote Orange County Register Editor Charles Apple, who first brought attention to The Daily News’ photoshopping.

The Daily News declined to comment on its editorial decision, but the question of whether to publish graphic images is one many other editors confront.

FOR GORE

Some advocate for the publication of graphic photos, arguing that text can never show the true magnitude of a horror as visuals do.

“I think TV news distances and ‘shrink-wraps’ human suffering,” writes Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. “[A]nd I believe such mode of reporting is against the public interest.”

a “boot camp” for journalists

Reddit is a great training tool for writers because unlike on Facebook and Twitter, users cannot lean on their followers and friends to make their posts successful. Instead, each post’s quality of writing and message is individually evaluated. Each post has an equal likelihood of making it to the site’s front page at its genesis, regardless of its author. Thus large follower bases aren’t rewarded, as they would be on Twitter and Facebook. What’s instead rewarded is concise and witty writing, the length of “half-tweets” — the same skills vital for writing headlines, which in the digital era are more important than ever. And with the deluge of posts on the site (last month there were over 55 million unique Redditors), users must hone these skills for their writing to make the front page.

For a few hours it seemed as though progress was being made in penetrating the wall of censorship that the Chinese authorities had built around the country’s Internet services. Yet barely 24 hours after it was registered, The New York Times’ Sina Weibo account was suspended, before being mysteriously reinstated early this afternoon. The Times had joined Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-equivalent, at the same time as it launched its Chinese language site, http://cn.nytimes.com, and within a few hours the NYT account had been "liked" by 3,300 people.

The Journalism Foundation, an independent charitable organisation that aims to encourage press freedom and investigative journalism both in the UK and abroad, has been launched today.

The foundation is backed by the Lebedev family, who became the owners of The Independent in 2010, a newspaper for which Simon Kelner, the foundation's Chief Executive Officer, was editor in chief for ten years. The trustees of this new non-profit, according to the Journalism Foundation's website, are: "Baroness Kennedy, the renowned human rights lawyer, Lord Fowler, former chair of the House of Commons media select committee, and Sir John Tusa, former director general of BBC World Service". Evgeny Lebedev, Chairman of The Independent and The Evening Standard, will head the board.

The organization aims to support public interest journalism by backing investigative journalism, community reporting and encouraging press freedom in nations like Tunisia where, in the aftermath of massive political change, press freedom is a newly nascent possibility. The foundation also aims to establish bursaries for individual journalists and run a yearly award to recognize achievements in the field.