The television journalists who covered Katrina reflect on the storm - and how they covered it - in a series of exclusive interviews. Here are some of the highlights, courtesy of TVNewser's Brian Stelter:

Viewers didn't know it at the time, but NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams - whose on-the-scene coverage of Hurricane Katrina helped earn NBC a Peabody Award - fell "terribly ill" in the days following the storm.

On Tuesday, August. 30, "we did a broadcast from the I-10 overpass," Williams recalls. "I thought I could stand up, and I got very weak. They started pumping me with fluids and made me sit down on an equipment box for the broadcast."

Williams was clearly uncomfortable discussing the illness.

"The only problem I have with it being public ... is that I am the last person people should be thinking about," he says. "I was surrounded by such depravity, watching people try to survive with such great quiet dignity, that I have a real problem with any attention [directed toward me]."

Williams never revealed his illness to viewers.

More here. Also, related, see the blog's Year of Katrina series.

Is a "gentleman's agreement" between reporter and source broken when a blogger beats a reporter by posting their exchange first? Greg Lindsay investigates:

All Kate Kaye wanted were a couple of quotes. Back in April, the news editor of the interactive marketing news site ClickZ spotted the news that Weblogs Inc., the blog network that Calacanis had started and sold to AOL, were introducing regionally themed sites. Seeing as how the news fit neatly into a story package Kaye happened to be working on, she dropped Calacanis a line. Did he have time for a quick interview? Sure, he replied, but only via email. I do all my interviews via email these days, he told her, to prevent myself from being misquoted. With misgivings, Kaye fired off a volley of questions that Calacanis promptly answered. After a few rounds of back-and-forth follow-ups, Kaye was satisfied she had enough for her story. She thanked him and promptly forgot about it, at least until her executive editor pointed her to Calacanis' personal blog a week later. To Kaye's horror, he had posted their exchange, email headers and all, on his personal blog, as Calacanis is wont to do.

Read on here.

This weekend I learned a little lesson on what to do if you feel that your work has been copied without your permission.

On Saturday, I received an email from Copyblogger's Brian Clark, telling me that he enjoyed MBToolBox's riff on his post '5 Signs Your Blog Post is Going Horribly Wrong.' Also, he wondered what my thoughts were on the fact that a post identical to mine was up on a blog at the UK Telegraph--minus attribution or a link.

I looked at the site and was confused--it definitely was my post, including identifying features like the fact that I live in Chicago and listen to the White Sox on the radio. However, I was convinced that I was missing something, but I double, triple, quadruple checked the post and then realized that, yep--that was my work but without my name on it.

I was perturbed but don't like to be known for being a jerk. So I addressed the source directly--blogger Melissa Whitworth. If it was an accident, I wanted to give her the chance to correct it rather than creating a total sh*tstorm by contacting her editors and threatening legal action. So I sent the following email:

continued...

The nice thing about running this particular blog is that unlike some of my counterparts, I don't have to worry too much about making scoops and covering breaking news. Yes, there are timely things I need to pay attention to but fortunately I don't need to be the first to publish photos of Shiloh or report that a strange smell is emanating from downtown Manhattan.

However, other blogs do have to concern themselves with being first on the scene--but the ability to report quickly online also comes with a greater danger of inaccuracy. Rick Edmonds at Poynter explores the issues:

This article is the first of a two-part series based on Poynter faculty members' visits to print and TV newsrooms this spring. Their goal was to learn more about what news organizations are doing to develop their online products. This article, along with the one to follow, is an analysis of the insights they collected. For more information on the metholodogy of the faculty study and to see which news organizations participated, see the sidebar below.

Kathy Gannon reveals what it was like to report from Kabul and other parts of war-torn Afghanistan during her 18-year tenure as the AP's correspondent there:

It was Oct. 23, 2001. The U.S.-led coalition had launched Operation Enduring Freedom just two weeks earlier. The bombs were pounding the Taliban's Afghanistan and every Western journalist covering the story was either in Pakistan or in enclaves in northern Afghanistan controlled by the coalition's Afghan partners, known as the Northern Alliance. As for me, I was on my way to Kabul, the only Western journalist allowed by the Taliban to return to their territory.

I have been in the region 18 years. I covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the communist regime and the four-year rule of the U.S.-backed mujahedeen, led by the Northern Alliance. Those four years were particularly brutal, marked by bloody internecine fighting that left 50,000 Afghan civilians dead in Kabul alone. I was there when the Taliban swarmed into Kabul in September 1996 having sent the Northern Alliance leaders fleeing north. Because I had persisted in my coverage throughout the Taliban rule, meeting them on the front lines, and in their heartland in the south, the Taliban let me back into Kabul while denying all other western reporters access. Some Taliban even knew me from the 1980s Soviet invasion.

More here. Or read an excerpt from Gannon's book here.

Like most nonfiction writers, I think a lot about objectivity in journalism. I've had magazine editors tell me that they would never hire me because of the work I do for corporate publications, and I think, well, yeah, but major enterprise software companies know that their customers are too smart to read ads, so they demand good stories. Meanwhile, many magazines consider it gutsy to write stories critical of cigarette smoking, because after all, they rely on cigarette ads for revenue.

And how often have we been subjected to the false-objective story, in which some crackpot gets to spout for half of a story in the name of balance? You know, the "Dr. Suzy Psycho, research fellow with the American Federation of Tar and Nicotine Producers, noted that there is significant controversy in the scientific community about whether or not cigarette smoking leads to a hacking cough. 'Our studies show that breathing clean air causes more respiratory distress than breathing the air in a studio apartment shared with a two-pack-a-day smoker,' she said."

I made that up, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, given the reflexive charges of bias that pervade the biased American media, I thought this article in Duke's alumni magazine about the lacrosse team incident was interesting. It doesn't go into the case itself so much as the effects of the controversy on the campus. I thought it was pretty balanced, given how close we are in time to the event and how close the magazine is to the story. It's a good example of how an article can be critical yet balanced, fair yet still deeply reported.

And no, I didn't go to Duke. I don't have feelings for Duke one way or another. I came across this article while looking up information about Duke for a story I'm working on now, and I thought that you might find it interesting, too.

The non-profit world started the day with a bang, as Warren Buffett announced that he was giving $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Naturally, the man who owns both Dairy Queen and See's Candies has a heart of gold.

Anyway, if this news inspires you to write about the non-profit world, here are a few places to go to for research. Guidestar and CharityWatch both have great information on how effectively a not-for-profit uses the money raised. If you are covering churches, you might want to check out the Evangelical Council on Financial Accountability, which offers background on that large class of non-profits.

If you are writing about volunteer issues, check out the site for the United Nations International Year of the Volunteer. Management issues are tracked by The Alliance for Nonprofit Management.

Via Poynter's The Mechanic and the Muse:

Online Journalism Review features a provocative interview with Adrian Holovaty, editor for editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com, perhaps best known for his ground-breaking one-man site chicagocrime.org, "a freely browsable database of crimes in Chicago." (Typically, we have Jim Romenesko to thank for the link.)

OJR editor Robert Niles opens the interview by asking Holovaty, "how does one "do journalism" through computer programming?"

Read on here.

Against a backdrop of steroids and scandal, Barry Bonds' chase of Babe Ruth's home run record produced a firestorm of coverage, but few members of the sports media came to his defense, writes Steve Bloom:

Like Bonds' assault on Mark McGwire's short-lived home run record — which he shattered in 2001 — Bonds' chase of Ruth's 714 home run mark (the second-highest all-time behind Hank Aaron's 755) prompted a firestorm of media coverage. Except this time around, the media has largely been unforgiving. ESPN, which has taken to pre-empting its regular programming to broadcast Bonds' nightly at-bats, has been criticized for relinquishing some degree of editorial control of its Bonds On Bonds reality show to the embattled slugger. [UPDATE: Bloom reports today that the show may go on hiatus.]

Leading the steady anti-Bonds chorus of opinions, columns and general sniping in the nation's sports pages has been New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica. The day after Bonds tied Ruth on May 20, Lupica wrote: "It should have been a fine baseball day yesterday, even if Bonds only went into second place on the all-time list. It was not. Because it was him ... It was history, just the wrong kind, from the wrong guy."

More here.

Broadcasters, editors, publishers and other media people use journalism terms and other jargon. mediabistro readers are "media-savvy" but may not always know what it means when a magazine editor asks that you go long with a warm-and-wonder or violin piece.

These terms, and about 2000 others, are defined in my new book, The Language of the Media: The Skinny About Best Boys, Dollies, Green Rooms, Leads and Other Media Lingo.) A long title, I know, but a low price ($14.95). Here are some more terms used by magazine editors and others in the media industry:

To go long is write an article that is longer than average, such as a 20,000-word article in The Atlantic. Warm-and-wonder is a heartwarming upbeat article. A violin piece is a lead story (first major article) that sets the tone for the magazine, particularly if it's a theme issue (devoted to a single subject).

Are you a freelancer? In the Middle Ages (from about the 6th to the 16th centuries), a "free lance" was a mercenary or independent solider, with a lance or spear, who sold his services. Carrying out this tradition, freelancers (men and women) now sometimes combat with editors.

Are you a stringer? A stringer is a correspondent, generally part-time, for a newspaper or other publication, who is not on staff. The origin is from "on the string," being paid a variable amount depending on the quantity of writing accepted by the editor. In the 19th and early 20th century, some editors paid a part-time reporter by keeping the reporter's clippings tied together on a string and literally paid by the number of clippings or the number of column inches published, also perhaps measured with a string. Another possible origin comes from the era of hot metal, when type was assembled in a galley tray. Each writer's lines of type were tied together with a string.

Read on here.