In journalism school, plagiarism is equivalent to life without parole: it is the bane of any writer's existence and an automatic halt on one's professional reputation. We are told over and over and over again to source everything, make sure all of your facts line up and that we'll be outcasted from the journalistic community if we dare even think of the word 'plagiarism.' For more information, check out "Shattered Glass," the tale of the Rise and Fall of The New Republic's Stephen Glass, who fabricated entire articles for a quick shot at fame.
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Steven Thrasher

Gregory Lee (foreground) of NABJ in a heated exchange with LZ Granderson of ESPN and Mark Whitaker of CNN

Updated below, with a message from former UNITY board member John Yearwood.

Greetings from New York, New York (the city, not the casino) as the Voice has returned from the 2012 UNITY convention in Las Vegas.

The elephant in the room for UNITY, as CNN Worldwide Managing Editor Mark Whitaker acknowledged in UNITY's first panel, was the absence of the National Association of Black Journalists.

For many years, multiple groups of minority journalists (NABJ, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, and the Native American Journalists Association) would meet every four years in what became the largest "Journalists of Color" convention in the world (and the largest gathering of journalists, period, in the United States). But in a highly public battle, NABJ decided it would not participate in UNITY 2012 about a year ago.

Meanwhile, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association joined UNITY a few months later. The formal name "UNITY Journalists of Color" was changed to simply "UNITY Journalists."

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Jules Feiffer, the cartooning legend who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his work at the Voice (and many other kudos over the years!), will receive another prestigious accolade in April: the 2012 John Fischetti Lifetime Achievement Award, given by Columbia College Chicago.

Feiffer is also an Obie-winning playwright, celebrated screenwriter, and the first cartoonist commissioned by the New York Times' for its op-ed page. He has taught at colleges across the U.S., and now calls Southampton home.

Runnin' Scared took a sec to catch up with Feiffer and chat about his win, changes in the cartoon world, and his current projects: Hint -- a graphic novel is in the works!

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Yesterday, the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York City, released its annual "Attacks on the Press" report , which paints a grim picture of the deaths, imprisonments, and censorship of reporters across the country. The report says that, in some ways, the findings are more troubling than ever, and today, news broke supporting the need for greater attention on threats to the free press: two journalists covering Syria died pursuing a deadly bombardment of a central city.

Just last week, Anthony Shadid, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, also died in Syria, due to an apparent asthma attack.

This latest news fits into a larger landscape of increasingly complex challenges for reporters internationally, which the CPJ's full report available online describes in great detail.

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A note to the media -- if you're going to accuse a public figure of elitism, perhaps you shouldn't totally make things up in order to achieve that goal. The Telegraph of London learned this the hard way, after publishing an article which falsely reported that First Lady Michelle Obama had an entire Fifth Avenue lingerie store shut down so that she could shop with Her Highness Sheikha Moza of Qatar.

The First Lady, being the kind of person who favors small, independent designers and rewearing the same outfit more than once (the horror!), was understandably upset at this suggestion of opulence, and the Telegraph was forced to issue this rather sheepish retraction in response:

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Playboy

The above is Hunter S. Thompson's hangover cure, according to a cache of his letters released by Playboy. It's 12 amyl nitrites and "as many beers as necessary." Amyl nitrites are poppers, FYI. What did you expect Hunter S. Thompson's hangover cure to be? Green tea and a hot yoga session? Color us unsurprised.

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Our man Randy Cohen

It's been six months since the New York Times Magazine replaced Randy Cohen, the four-time Emmy Award winner who wrote the Ethicist column for 12 years and made the rounds as a congenial moral-principle purveyor everywhere from NPR to Oprah. Since his winter departure, the former Letterman writer has been trying to develop A Question of Ethics, a call-in audio show of "moral advice without a lot of damn moralizing." The long-term goal appears to be shaping the project into something public radio would sponsor, but in the short-term, Cohen's taken to crowdsourced-fundraising site Kickstarter in the hopes of financing a kind of radio-show demo, three-months' worth of weekly 10-minute podcasts.

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Interesting factoid: the Watergate scandal caused enrollment in journalism schools to be at an all-time high in 1974, since budding journalists wanted to be just like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

JY CINEMASHUP - All the President's Boys from Jeff Yorkes on Vimeo.

Could this remix of the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" with All The President's Men, the movie that made paging through documents in a library look sexy and dangerous, cause a similar effect?

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That's quite the photo.

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In case you missed it, President Obama threw a "hip-hop barbecue" yesterday for his birthday, which somehow failed to create jobs. Or so shrieks this headline from Fox Nation, Fox News' aggregation organ. Non-hip-hop artists Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock performed while "Rome burned" (look at the URL). The race-baiting and unethically edited aggregation have been mentioned elsewhere, so we'll raise a somewhat different question: where was Philips Andover's stable of up-and-coming young rappers during the Obama Hip Hop BBQ, such an important event in the genre?

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