Colin Campbell of the Clayton News-Star and News & Observer reports that the Johnston school board has approved new policies regulating student and teacher use of social media. The board wants principals to be able to crack down on bullying and other harassment.

Campbell reports that principals could discipline students for posted comments as if the student had made the comment at school. Also, teachers can't use social media to communicate with students, parents or co-workers. So a teacher cannot "friend" a student on Facebook. It will be interesting to see if other school systems follow Johnston's lead. --John Drescher

Chuck Liddy is one of our most experienced photojournalists, and he has been down in Greensboro shooting the Edwards trial.  He is part of the group of photographers for newspapers and TV networks who have been training their cameras on Edwards, his daughter and his parents as they come in to the courthouse and as they exit the courthouse. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, the reason Chuck and the others have been restricted to these shots is because the federal court doesn't allow any cameras inside. Not a pool video, and not a pool still photographer. 

Meanwhile, you've been able to see and hear all the witnesses in the Williford trial, because it is in the state court in Raleigh. 

(By the way, federal judges - who are appointed for life - don't much care if you don't like this ban on cameras in their courts. One of the swell byproducts of lifetime appointments.)

Back to Chuck. He thought about how it would be nice to get a different vantage point, and so he did the following. I quote from an email he sent me from Greensboro:

"I bought a 12 foot painters pole, retrofitted a screw mount attachment for my GoPro camera and had it set to shoot a photo every half a second. Then just held the camera extended out right in front of them as they walked in."

The result is the picture above.

Charles Apple, a widely respected news designer, had many nice things to say about Chuck on his blog.

Incidentally, if you have seen reprints of the photo of Christian Laettner breaking Kentucky's heart in the '92 East Regional final,  it was likely Chuck's, when he was working for the Durham Herald-Sun. 

At commencement on May 13, I spoke to graduates of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We recently published excerpts of my speech.  In preparing the speech, I came across three courageous journalists who continued to speak out, even when threatened with violence (or in one case, a cartoonist whose hands were broken by thugs but has resumed drawing).

I discovered Maryam Durani, who operates a radio station in Afghanistan, and Ali Ferzat, a cartoonist in Syria, in Time magazine's issue devoted to 100 people who are making a difference. Kudos to Matt McAllester and Matt Wuerker for their fine little pieces on Durani and Ferzat, respectively. Here's the nice ending to Wuerker's ode to Ferzat: "It thought it could silence Ferzat and break his will by breaking his hands. Instead it created a powerful symbol who draws cartoons the whole world is now reading. Talk about a great punch line."

I discovered the third journalist, Dina Meza of Honduras, on the excellent Reporters Without Borders site. Thanks goodness for the work this group does to help protect reporters across the world. I also made a reference to President Harry Truman's old-school values, which I read about in Ronald Kessler's mini-review of David McCullough's biography. McCullough said Truman held to old guidelines: Work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear. That's a good code to live by in any era. --John Drescher

You're hearing a lot and will hear more about Bain Capital, the private equity firm that was co-founded by Mitt Romney. President Obama and his campaign have been critical of private equity economics, insofar as Romney has been citing his business background investing in a broad range of companies as a major credential in his quest for the presidency.

Allowing for the fact that Tom Friedman of the New York Times falls passionately in love with all things new and shiny, he has a column about online college education that is worth reading.

Online higher education is already here, both in colleges that are completely online and hybrids that have both physical campuses and online courses. 

My own experience suggests that online is not always a one-for-one substitute for classroom instruction, but in many cases it can be very close. Or better.

I can tick off classes where it probably would have been better taking a class online than listening to the professor's bad jokes, flights off on a tangent and uninspiring teaching of the textbook.

I had a professor in graduate school who bolted in the middle of the semester to work on a government contract in Eastern Europe. We were left in the care of his Bulgarian teaching assistant. Not much learning went on in Comparative Media Systems that semester 20 years ago.

You can find online classes at the community and four-year colleges in North Carolina, and I doubt many students and a bricks-and-mortar school will go through a degree program without taking some classes online.

But in my discussion with college officials from time to time, none of them seem to think that online education will eventually eliminate the residential university model, with its classrooms, dorms, etc.  I agree. A certain percentage of 18-year-olds will want the UNC or N.C. State or ECU experience, which is a whole lot more than what happens in the classroom. 

But I think that model has seen its high-water mark.  As online colleges become more accepted, higher quality, and ubiqitous, they have great potential to disrupt this residential model. Especially if - without the very high overhead, expensive research missions and tenured faculty - these online schools can offer an accredited diploma for a much lower price. You've seen a lot of stories in recent weeks about college graduates and the outrageous student loans they will be paying for years.

Ironically, the best positioned institutions to get big into online education are the established residential universities, because they already have the most important assets - faculties and brand names.  But they would have to utterly transform themselves. And change is very difficult in the academic village. Tenured faculties are wary of anything that they think will dilute the academics. These universities have also invested tremendously in their physical plants. We have spent billions in North Carolina alone in the past two decades, even as digital education has been on the rise.

 So I don't look for this online transformation to be led by the blue-chip schools.  They will make some noises about digital, but they have too much invested, emotionally and physically, in the old model. 

Meanwhile, the market is segmenting in a big way -- with a growing group student consumers who are fine with  college-education-as-a-digital-commodity. They don't care if their dads ever have to schlep their futon up to the third floor of  Hinton James dorm on a really, really hot August day, because paying a premium to live and learn on campus isn't worth it to them.

Probably we should do a story about his. At high school and college graduations, there are family members who quietly clap when their child's name is called to receive a diploma. And then there are families that holler and yell and carry on.

Which one of the candidates for governor strikes you as being more likely to be in the office on the weekend, sweating over how to get more people to work in North Carolina?

I'm thinking that the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce is not going to update its business recruiting materials for this one.

Thomasi McDonald, our police reporter, was trying to get a vantage point to see what was happening Monday afternoon with the woman who was threatening to jump off the top of the parking deck in downtown, which would have been an 80-foot drop.  He got a good view from the BB&T building, and he called Scott Sharpe, the photo editor. Scott's photographers were all deployed, so he grabbed his camera with a long lense and walked over to the BB&T. He went up to the 16th floor and the folks in an office were kind enough to let him get a perch at a window.

That's how Scott got the dramatic photo that ran on the front of Triangle & Co. this morning. Scott had photos that showed the woman's face, but opted to run a picture that showed her from the back.

Raleigh Police senior officer Jamie Priest did a good job of talking the woman off of the ledge of the parking deck. The police took her into custody but said she would probably not be charged with a crime. They did not release her name or what brought her to the ledge. Presumably, I hope, she is getting some help and treatment.

These situations are complicated for journalists.

I had a managing editor when I was a young reporter in Norfolk who applied a rule of thumb in deciding what to do with things like this. He said if it caused a "commotion," then we probably should cover it.  In this case the commotion was evident. The police blocked off several downtown streets for several hours Monday afternoon, keeping cars and pedestrians away from the scene. It was a very public situation that disrupted downtown Raleigh on a busy weekday.

At the same time, we wanted to take care with the photo. We didn't need to show her face to tell the story. The woman's got enough problems, and she wasn't charged. There's no iron-clad rule here, and another set of editors might have made a different decision. This isn't accounting, where the debits always go on the left and the credits on the right, and the rules are all written down. In journalism, you make the best decisions you can, applying humanity, experience, some ethical guideposts and common sense, and live with them.

In point of fact, one major focus of the story wasn't the woman, but Officer Priest, who managed to calm the woman down and talk her out of doing harm to herself.

Scott's photo was noteworthy, in that regard, because you could see Officer Priest up close, doing what he needed to do to save a life.

Tomorrow morning at 8:30 the government will release the jobs number for April, its best estimate of how many nonfarm jobs were added during the month. We will have it on our web site as soon as we get it.

This is an intensely political number. A good number is good for President Obama, because he can make the case that his economic policies are helping the recovery in the job market.  A bad number is good for Mitt Romney, who will be able to keep saying that the Obama policies have been a drag on the recovery.

But what's a good number? Well, that depends, and that means both the Obama administration and the Romney campaign may argue - based on the same jobs number - that they are each right.

The Bloomberg survey of around 82 economists has a median of 160,000 jobs created. That ranges from a low of 82,000 from one economist to a high of 210,000 from another economist.

Frankly, even if the number is 210,000, that's not impressive.  And just as frankly, this has been a pretty mediocre recovery. That's not news, but we have gotten used to monthly numbers between 100,000 and 250,000 new jobs, and, really, we should be seeing 300,000 and 400,000 and 500,000 new jobs being created each month. The new normal is pretty weak.  

In 2008, you may recall, things started going downhill fast in the final year of the George W. Bush presidency.  In the winter of 2008, the layoffs started, began accelerating in the spring and summer, and then the economy fell off a clif in the fall of 2008, when everything seized up, credit froze, banks started failing, and people were getting laid off left and right.  In one month, January 2009, the economy lost 818,000 jobs. From February 2008 through February 2010, a two-year stretch, the economy shed nearly 8.8 million jobs. 

By the spring of 2010, most of the bleeding had stopped.  There were still some bad months, but the massive layoffs slowed down, which meant that the hiring that was going on was able to create some net new job growth in the economy. Since March 2010, the economy has added nearly 3.6 million jobs.

But you do the math. We lost 8.8 million jobs from February 2008 through February 2010. And we have added 3.6 million since March 2010.  That leaves a deficit of 5.2 million jobs. If we are adding at the rate of 200,000 a month - which would be optimistic - then it will take many years to get back to even. 

That is essentially the Republican argument, that the Obama administration's health care plan and excess regulation and environmental obsession have put a huge wet blanket on the economy.  Companies are afraid to invest in jobs because they don't know how the new health care regime will affect them.  The president's Keystone decision stopped the creation of thousands of new construction jobs. The president's tax proposals are damaging to investor confidence. Things could be a whole lot better. That's what the Republicans say. 

The president's response is that he inherited a huge mess from the Republicans and things are getting better, and do you want to hand the reins back to the folks who got us in this hole in the first place? In other words, things could be a whole lot worse.

Which, frankly,  isn't a terrific bumper sticker. "Re-elect Obama: Things could be worse.". 

When you can come to our web site tomorrow morning and see the jobs numbers, you can decide for yourself which argument you buy.

Here's what I believe: the outcome of the presidential election this November will hinge on the next five monthly jobs numbers, including tomorrow's report, because if we don't start seeing some really big job gains by August, what happens in September and October won't matter.  Enough people will stop buying the "Things could be worse" argument" and take a flier on Romney's "Things could be a whole lot better" argument.

 (George H.W. Bush found this out the hard way in '92. He thought things were looking up that fall. Voters didn't feel it. Clinton's people recited the mantra "It's the economy, stupid," and they were dead on.) 

Forget about all the other chatter and noise. Block out the one-day kerfluffles, the gaffes, the cable stories. Five monthly jobs reports  between tomorrow morning and Friday morning, Sept. 7, the day of the Labor Department's August employment statistics release, will play the dominant role in determining whether Mitt Romney will be moving his stuff into the Oval Office on the afternoon of  Jan. 20 next.