Making Sense of the Media

Is seven million views on the internet more punishment than being charged with stealing?

That's the thinking of a man who caught two women stealing his beach tent on New Smyrna Beach, Florida on the Fourth of July.

He video taped the whole thing and posted it to the internet where it got seven million views -- and the numbers are still climbing.

He decided not to press charges, figuring their worldwide internet shaming was punishment enough.

The 7-1 victory by Germany over Brazil in the World Cup generated the most activity around a single sports game on Twitter ever.

Over 35-and-a-half million tweets during the game itself, and at peak volume, nearly 600,000 people were tweeting about it at the same time.

Are internet comments sections the new town square, or cesspools of racism, sexism and worse?

Whenever you scroll down through a comments section, at some point you encounter something that makes you cringe.

Can these often offensive comments sections be improved without cutting off free speech?

"It's definitely problematic and if we're going to make the internet work as a form of communication, we have got to figure this out," said Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute's Sense-making Project.

When you want to know something about somebody or something and do an internet search, where do you most often end up?

Is it Wikipedia?

The online, crowd-sourced, encyclopedia has become something of the encyclopedia of the wired generation.

Jimmy Wales founded the company that launched Wikipedia in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2001.

And it's a go-to source for information on just about everything.

The White House recently released a Task Force report on sexual assault on college campuses, saying one-in-five women on college campuses are sexually assaulted and calling for more education and enforcement.

New York Times Columnist Maureen Dowd was in the state of Colorado a while back, a state that has legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

She decided to eat a couple of bites of a marijuana-infused chocolate bar as she sat in her hotel room.

And now she's written about the experience -- which was not a good one.

Twenty-two-year old Elliot Roger killed six people in a rampage in Santa Barbara, California.

It was a rampage predicted by a series of YouTube videos and writings that serve as a manifesto of a young man seeking revenge for his loneliness.

The news media was all over this back story to the tragic killings.

In the newspaper business, editors are not particularly loved.

In fact, they have long had a reputation for being tough, hard-headed and difficult to work with.

Yet, that's exactly the reputation Jill Abramson had as the first female editor of The New York Times.

And, being tough to work with was reportedly one of the reasons she was fired.

A football player kisses his partner when he gets the news that he's been drafted by an NFL team.

What's the big deal?

Well, it was Michael Sam, becoming he first openly gay man to be drafted by the NFL. And he was kissing his boyfriend Vito Cammisano.

Twitter and other social media lit up after ESPN broadcast the moment -- over and over and over again.

The President of the United States spent a day recently doing interviews at the White House with local and national weather forecasters.

It wasn't about getting a consensus on the weather forecast for Washington, D.C.

No, the President wanted to talk about a new climate change report.

After decidedly racist comments by  Donald Sterling, owner of the L-A Clippers basketball team, were made public by the gossip website TMZ, the National Basketball Association (NBA) moved quickly to ban Sterling from the game for life. 

Sterling's comments were secretly taped by his girlfriend. 

Plenty of people share photos on the internet.       

Plenty of those photos go viral.

But few viral photos are as stunning as the ones published by BBC magazine of Mongolia's first female eagle hunter. See some of the photos here.

But with the proliferation of iPhone pet photos and news organizations firing whole photography departments, is this kind of photography doomed or poised to take a new leap with internet exposure?

The Pulitzer Prizes honoring excellence in journalism were handed out last week --  including the Public Service award to The Washington Post and The Guardian for their coverage of the Edward Snowden and the N.S.A. documents he leaked.

Statistician Nate Silver made quite the splash with his "FiveThirtyEight" blog on the New York Times website.

Why? Well, he very accurately predicted the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election, for one thing.

So, now Silver -- with backing from ESPN -- has launched his own FiveThirtyEight website.

The tweet from Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Gay  -- sent from a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament game at Madison Square Garden -- read as follows:

"NCAA has very strict rules for NCAA-only cups at March Madness. I have brought my cat mug. Stay tuned."

Be advised. This story may seem to have a high nerd potential.  But it really does have a lot of significance to news consumers in the digital age.

A furor was unleashed recently when the Associated Press announced to a convention of newspaper copy editors that its stylebook -- the usage bible for editors everywhere -- was going to allow the use of both "over" and "more than" to describe an amount.

Believe it or not, this change cut deep for the men and women who spend their working hours trying to be precise in their use of language.

So which super power should you have? Which U.S. President are you?  Which member of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials are you?

Seriously, there's actually a quiz for all of those questions on the internet.

There's no real answer as to why anyone would actually want to know these things, but Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute's "Sense-Making Project" does have some answers about why there are all these online quizzes.

President Barack Obama has been leaving no stone unturned in his search for signups to the Affordable Care Act ahead of the March 31st deadline. 

To get his message to the younger crowd, the President even made an appearance on "funnyordie.com's" fake cable access show, "Between Two Ferns," hosted by comedian Zack Galifianakis.

Former assistant Penn State football coach Mike McQueary is a hero to some for revealing that he saw former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky sexually assault a young boy in a Penn State locker room in 2001.

That got Sandusky sent to prison... but it also led to the resignation of Penn State's beloved head football coach Joe Paterno.

McQueary had said he told Paterno about the abuse but nothing was ever done about it.

"House of Cards - Season Two" premiered on "Netflix" Friday, February 21.      

By that Sunday,  two percent of Netflix customers -- that's 634,000 households -- had watched all 13 episodes.

That's 13 hours of one TV show.

That is what we're now calling "binge watching!"