"So once again, we see that Twitter is generally the sounding board for true idiots," writes Christian Blood, contributor for Bleacher Report. The Green Bay Packers defeated the Chicago Bears 21-14 in Sunday's NFC Championship Game, advancing to Superbowl XLV against the Pittsburgh Steelers, scheduled for Feb. 6 at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. But people aren't focusing on the Packers' win or the upcoming Superbowl, no, they're talking about Bears quarterback Jay Cutler's injury and the bombardment of Twitter insults that followed.

Athletes and professional media have had a long history of working together to act as the sole source of sports news. Recall the famous 1961 MLB season during which New York Yankees Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris raced to beat Babe Ruth's elusive, almost holy, 60 home run single-season record (set in 1927). Mantle, a charismatic Yankee veteran was open to the press, whereas small-town North Dakota native Maris, who was new to the overwhelming limelight of New York City, was soft-spoken around reporters. Consequently, the press painted Mantle as the hero, and Maris, who went on to hit 61 home runs that season to break Ruth's record, as the villain. Reporters asked questions, players answered (or didn't), reporters wrote newspaper articles, fans read the articles and formulated their opinions - that was how sports journalism worked.

"Media ethics are in a mess", says Simon Jenkins on the Guardian. "Shock disclosure - journalists sometimes behave unethically," he writes, leaving secrecy and privacy as things of the past and electronic surveillance and the internet demand a new map of the boundaries, he argues.

New technologies and the infinite possibilities of the Web have changed the barriers of privacy. The present world is the realm of all being public: pictures, status updates, "what's on one's mind". Facebook rules.

Consequently it's becoming harder to define boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate, ethical and unethical, legal and illegal.

"Journalistic ethics, if not a contradiction in terms, are a mess. This is the downside of fierce media competition and weak legislation on surveillance technology. It is also a consequence of a thoroughly confused boundary between the public and private realms, between openness and secrecy, publicity and privacy, rapacity and trust," Jenkins said to this end.

It's up to who to fix these boundaries? The duty of journalists is to go after the story, scrutinize those in power, report the truth and follow the public interest. But what is the difference between news of public interest and news revealed in the public interest? Because there is a difference, of course.

UC-Berkeley invites international journalists to apply through March 14 for a unique program providing mid-career journalists from outside the U.S. an opportunity to pursue advanced professional training and academic study at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. In the non-degree Visiting Scholar program, participants can audit courses offered at the journalism school and in other disciplines, drawing upon the extensive resources and community life of a major research university. Journalists accepted to the program can participate for either the entire 2011-2012 academic year or for a single semester of their choice. Information about the program, including fees and application requirements, is here.

Its founders believe that The Daily's success will depend on the quality of its journalism, Tech Crunch's Robin Wauters reported based his notes from an interview with James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert and currently Chairman and CEO of News Corporation Europe and Asia. Murdoch was interviewed on stage at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany.

"Murdoch touched on everything from its relationship with Google to paywalls for online newspapers, iPad applications and more", Wauters preannounced.

So, James Murdoch said The Daily is going to be launched in the next few weeks (or at least he hopes so) and it is going to be "a brand new piece of journalism. It will succeed or fail on the journalism part, not the bells and whistles".

The main objective - he said - is to provide high quality journalism at an affordable price (126 journalists employed and 99 US cents a week).

Lawyers representing media outlets argue against government efforts to bring 'special advocate procedures' to civil trials, the Guardian reported. Proposals by MI5 and MI6 to extend courtroom secrecy to civil trials would unfairly restrict the right of the media to act as the "eyes and ears" of the public, the supreme court heard today. Lord Lester QC, representing the Guardian, the Times and the BBC told the court that the media's role is of particular importance in cases where the two agencies are facing allegations of complicity in torture. As the article reported, he said the proposals would not only interfere with the common law and European convention right to freedom of expression, but would undermine "the freedom of the press in acting as eyes and ears of the public as reporters of matters of legitimate concern". The secret court judgments that would follow would exclude media reporting "for all time", he added.

"Where's the money, Lebowski?!" 200 union workers, reminiscent of the European nihilists in the Coen brother's classic film, "The Big Lebowski", stormed into a private Mortgage Bankers Association conference in DC last Wednesday demanding answers, not from "The Dude", but from PulteGroup, one of America's largest homebuilding companies. Their question: "Where is the $900 million?"

Huffington Post blogger, Mike Elk, was dismissed on Thursday for his role as the culprit behind this stunt, having shared his media accreditation with a union leader in order to provide him, and subsequently 200 workers, access to the event.

Elk, a young freelance labor journalist, justifies his risky decision, writing, "I had seen labor struggles get ignored by the mainstream media. Recently, a publication canceled a story I wrote about a town that tried unsuccessfully to use eminent domain to save a factory from closing. The editor said that 'it was simply not that interesting of a story if the workers couldn't save the factory.'"

As the 2011 World Economic Forum starts today in Davos, Switzerland, there are abundant ways in which interested public can follow the activity via various different social media. In fact, the Forum has introduced a 'Social Media Corner' in the congress centre, to "serve as the central social hub to reach out to the general public to discuss a range of topics."

The Social Media Corner includes a Facebook station, and will stream live interviews with participants on its Facebook page. Facebook will also be used to "tap into the collective wisdom of the online population" through the use of quick Facebook polls, or 'pulses,' which in some sessions will be fed back into the panel discussion.

The Forum has taken questions via YouTube as part of its Ask a Leader initiative and will put a selection of the top-voted questions to world leaders at the WEF Annual Meeting, in a dedicated YouTube booth. Also through YouTube, the Forum selected a video blogger from its Davos Debates competition to participate at the meeting.

The hype in the mobile journalism world is about new smartphone and tablet apps. Publishing companies are pouring their money and trust into app development, but despite the growing popularity of smartphones, one overlooked fact remains - according to comScore, 172.5 million Americans currently own feature phones while just 61.5 million Americans own smartphones. One naturally has to wonder, "Why don't news organisations devote more effort towards appealing to the 74% of American mobile phone owners who use feature phones?"

A justification for the development of iPhone, iPad and Android apps, for example, are that they are much trendier than feature phones apps or even newspapers themselves, they are what most people aspire to own and that smartphones and tablets are the way of the future. But this doesn't answer the question, what about now? Why are newsrooms ignoring today's ratio of feature phone owners to smartphone owners?

Mallary Jean Tenore, in Poynter's "How To's" section, analysed why journalists get names wrong and how they should try to solve this.

Quoting Craig Silverman, author of "Regret the Error", she pointed out that academic research shows that misspelled names are the sixth most common newspaper error. The error is so common, Silverman said, because journalists forget to ask for the right spelling; rather they do it from memory, they assume the name is spelled the "normal way," or they're misled by incorrect sources online.

Tenore underlined that misspelling names is something happens frequently, starting with big newspapers. In some cases newspapers have even misspelled their own names, as happened in 2008 at the New Hampshire's Valley News.

Research has shown that inaccuracies cause the public to lose trust in the media.

The UK phone hacking scandal shows no signs of abating, the latest development being the resignation of Andy Coulson, Downing Street's director of communication, on 21 January.

His resignation had been anticipated for some time, The Economist noted. "Mr Coulson's troubles date back to his time as editor of the News of the World. Under his watch, investigative reporters at the Sunday tabloid newspaper had been exposed using techniques such as the hacking of voicemail messages to unearth stories about celebrities, politicians and even Royalty. He resigned over the revelations in 2007, but denied (and continues to deny) having any knowledge or complicity in these illegal journalistic practices", the article said.

As the paper underlined, many questioned the plausibility of those denials, he has been dogged by suspicion ever since.