Reporting

Lucy Dalglish is the Dean of Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. She is a leading expert in media law, having served as executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press from 2000 to 2012. She has also been an editor and reporter.

The following is excerpted from the Legal Guide of the Citizen Media Law Project, run through Harvard’s Berkman Center:

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Marianne English is a freelance health and science writer whose articles for Discovery News often focus on academic research. While pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she continues to publish pieces on a wide variety of subjects — everything from baseball and education to sharks and HIV.

From Wild West sheriffs trading drinks for votes to PACs pouring on the soft money, cash has long been central to politics. This relationship only deepened in January 2011 with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which enabled corporations to spend unlimited amounts in support of candidates — and anonymously, should they choose to do so.

Reporting intelligently about the financial markets has become increasingly important as more people have added stocks to their financial portfolios. Just 40 years ago less than 20% of U.S. households had some sort of stock ownership; now more than half do. While stocks are the most widely known financial product traded in the markets, others include bonds (debt, essentially), commodities and futures contracts, and currency.

The education category of Journalist’s Resource includes scholarly material on a variety of subjects within the discipline. The studies are selected for their timeliness, authority and public-policy importance.