Readers, however, have not been shy about telling us where we can improve. Several of you suggested we add the listings for the Verizon cable stations (Verizon serves Ipswich and a handful of other towns. You can find out which here).

We took your advice, and the listings can be found in the TV book every Saturday.

Don’t hesitate to let us know if there are other ways to make TV Spotlight more useful.

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Salem News Editorial Page Editor Nelson Benton has been honored with a Yankee Quill Award for his contributions to the betterment of journalism in the region.

The award is presented annually by the Academy of New England Journalists through the auspices of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. It is considered the highest individual honor awarded by fellow journalists in the region.

Benton was hired as a reporter at The Salem News in 1972. He has served as city editor and managing editor and became editorial page editor in 1995.

Benton’s work has been recognized by the New England Press Association, the New England Associated Press News Executives Association and the New England News Association, among others.

For the past quarter-century, he has written a weekly political column that is a must-read among both the elected and the electorate. For the past 20 years, he has overseen the Salem News Student-Athlete Award, a yearly highlight for local high school seniors.

In the past year he has launched an editorial writers’ blog on the paper’s Web site, salemnews.com, and moderated its first online debate.

Other honorees this year include John Howe, editor and general manager of The Citizen in Laconia, N.H., and Al Larkin, recently retired executive vice president of The Boston Globe. A posthumous award will be made to Ann Smith Franklin, one of the nation’s first woman printers and editors.

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While The Salem News can’t be there in person, Flanagan has generously agreed to give our readers a first-hand account of her experiences in her blog, Olympic Dreams.

Flanagan, who also competed in the 2004 Athens games, is the American record holder in the 3,000 (8:33.25), 5,000 (14:44.80) and 10,000 (30:34.49) meter races. She’s also an excellent writer, so please make sure to check in on her blog, which comes to you from halfway around the world.

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We’re not merely transferring our daily listings to a weekly guide. TV Spotlight covers listings for 50 cable stations — almost twice the number we offered in the daily paper. The new guide also covers listings for Direct TV and the Dish Network and highlights the best bets for the week in sports, as well as the top movies for each day of the week. There are feature stories on popular new shows and on-air celebrities. (Diane Sawyer graces today’s cover.) For puzzle junkies, there’s an extra crossword and a Sudoku puzzle. And there are great sales and offerings from local business advertisers.

You can still find Dear Abby, Wonderword, and the bridge and horoscope columns in the daily paper. The space formerly taken up by the daily TV grid will be filled with even more North Shore news.

We hope you’ll find the Saturday TV Spotlight — which you can also find online at salemnews.com — useful and convenient all week. Let us know if there are any adjustments or improvements we can make.

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But Carlin was also a writer, and a good one. He spent hours honing his material before going on stage, and was continually updating his routine throughout is four-decade career.

While “Seven Words” is his most famous bit, I’m partial to his take on “soft language,” the way direct writing becomes, well, soft. Toilet paper becomes bathroom tissue. Sneakers become running shoes. The dump becomes the landfill. Carlin does it best, as you can see here.

And lest you think he was as angry off the stage as on it, check out the reaction to his death from the folks at the North Shore Music Theatre, where Carlin appeared regularly.

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Our Masconomet High School interns, Kristina Bond and Maria Costigan, have finished up for the summer (and will be graduating Friday).

You’ve probably seen their bylines in the paper, including an interesting point-counterpoint on voting in last Saturday’s paper.

They’ve also left us with a pretty cool video on the monetary costs of teen smoking.

We’re not the only ones who were impressed. The duo was awarded first prize at a statewide film-shorts festival. The 30-second film demonstrates why Kristina and Maria are a part of “The 84” statewide youth movement, representing the 84 percent of Massachusetts youth who do not smoke. Their video was selected from more than 125 film entries as one of three first prize winners of the contest co-sponsored by Mass Youth Against Tobacco and WCVB-TV Channel 5. Kristina and Maria’s short will be shown on movie theater screens across the state during the month of June.

For more on the ‘Picture Perfect’ project, go here.

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The first edition from the club’s student writers debuted in March. The May issue is even larger than the first, with a boost to eight pages.

What’s the Word is written by members of the Media Club, a group of 11- to 15-year-olds that meets each Tuesday afternoon.

This is the second collaboration for The Salem News. The Witches Brew, the Salem High School student newspaper, debuted earlier this year; the second edition is due shortly.

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In the time it takes you to read this column, gas prices will have probably risen another few cents.

As I write this Friday morning, the news wires are reporting gasoline prices have hit yet another record high, reaching a national average of $3.83 a gallon. The $3.82 a gallon I spent filling the family pickup that morning had me yearning for the diminutive, fuel-sipping Ford Festiva I drove early in my career.

Don’t expect things to get better soon.

“We’re going to blast past $4,” James Cordier, a Florida-based trader, told The Associated Press.

A year ago at this time, we were complaining that prices were topping $3 a gallon.

We’ve all chuckled at the folks who drove all around town looking for the cheapest fuel, burning gas in the hopes of shaving a few cents a gallon off the cost of their refill.

Now there’s a better way.

The Salem News now offers local gas prices on its Web site. Go to Gas Watch at salemnews.com/gas, and you’ll find out which 10 North Shore stations are offering the best deals. (As of Friday morning, you could still find gas for $3.75 a gallon.)

The best part is that the information comes from local drivers, through GasBuddy, a site that uses volunteers to track prices at stations across the United States and Canada.

GasBuddy is often touted as one of the best examples of “crowdsourcing,” taking a job done by one person or company and essentially giving it to a large, open group of people. In this case, it’s a community of people coming together to help each other save some money on gas.

Gas Watch is also an improvement over the gas price reporting we’ve offered in the past, when a reporter would have to sit at his or her desk with a phone book and call all of our local stations, or drive the dozens of miles necessary to record prices that may have changed by the time the paper goes to print.

In this case, everybody wins. Until it’s time to fill the tank again.

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If the amount and tenor of the debate over the future of the Beverly schools is any indication, that city’s June 3 Proposition 2 override vote will draw an impressive number of voters to the polls.

While the vote is drawing near, there is still plenty of time for discussion.

The Salem News and BevCam, the city’s cable access station, are sponsoring a forum Thursday at the Senior Center on Colon Street. The event runs from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

Salem News Editorial Page Editor Nelson Benton and local attorney Scott Houseman will serve as moderators. The panel will be made up of two representatives from the anti-override group Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility (Elliott Margolis and Gail Burke) and two from the pro-override Yes! for Beverly (Tracey Armstrong and Joan Sullivan).

The public is welcome to attend, of course, and the forum will be broadcast live on BevCam Channel 10 and shown several times over the weekend leading up to the election, where voters will decide on the proposed $2.5 million property tax override.

Readers can participate, too, by e-mailing questions to be asked of the panelists. You can e-mail questions to forum@salemnews.com. We’ll do our best to get them answered.

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Finally, to end on an up note, fishing season is here and The Salem News is marking the occasion with the return of Frank Dwyer’s popular column, Fish Finder.

The column, which offers information and tips on all kinds of fishing from Marblehead to Seacoast New Hampshire will run every Friday on the sports page until ski season starts or the fish stop biting, whichever comes first.

Good luck.

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It has been a little more than a month since we added online commenting to stories on salemnews.com.

The response has been tremendous, with thousands of comments by readers on topics ranging from the important (the override debate in Beverly) to the somewhat silly (the fight over racy T-shirts at the mall).

We’re learning the world of online debate is different from the give-and-take on our opinion pages. In the print edition, a byline and quite often a picture accompanies the work of our guest columnists. Letters to the editor from readers are signed, and the author’s hometown is added.
There’s no place to hide from the reaction to your opinion.

On the Web, meanwhile, anonymous comments are widely accepted, and the use of witty pseudonyms is something of an art form.

Unfortunately, that facelessness can lead to exchanges that are repugnant, and others that are merely sad.

That was the case on salemnews.com earlier this month.

One case involved a piece about a lawsuit stemming from the suicide of a Beverly teenager. While the story was straightforward, it sparked a long string of online comments from her friends, family and onlookers. Over the course of an afternoon, the discussion devolved into a string of accusations, each more specific and outrageous than the last. The final straw for us was the accusation that her father orchestrated the suicide.

Later that day, in a separate string on a different story, a commenter accused the subject of a news item of sexual assault. The anonymous accusation had nothing to do with the story and set off a string of requests for “more details.”

We removed those toxic comments from our site. It’s not a decision we make lightly. We like the free exchange of opinions. In several cases, the online debate has added texture to the stories they reference. This is certainly true of the discussions surrounding the funding of the schools in Beverly and the push to establish a gay and lesbian support group at Gordon College.

At times, even those debates have pushed the boundaries of propriety and taste. But we figure those using the comments tool know the unwritten rules of the Internet. It’s when those rules clash with the rules of fairness in journalism in general and The Salem News in particular that we feel we have to step in.

Our rules for Internet comments are written down. We reserve the right to remove comments that:
r make false statements about a person, business or institution;
r reference the personal health, sexual activity or other private matters involving a story subject or commenter;
r threaten a story subject or commenter, or suggest violence;
r accuse someone of criminal activity;
r make crude statements about a child or children;
r include swearing or obscenity.

We will allow:
r opinions some people will find offensive;
r conversation that is simply strident in tone;
r criticism of public officials;
r criticism of people who are subjects of stories;
r pretty much everything else.

Being fans of the First Amendment, we try very hard to err on the side of leaving comments on our site.

But even one of the nation’s greatest champions of free speech, Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center, thinks online comments can sometimes go too far.

In a recent speech covered by the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Policinski said even “the repugnant comments serve the function of telling the public that these ideas exist.” He quickly added, however, that newspapers still have the right to set rules and standards while providing the public with a forum.

“The freedom of speech ought to mean you have something to say,” Policinski said. “A loud bleat in public is just a bleat, not speech. The freedom doesn’t necessarily allow for a mindless grunt.”

So far, the mindless grunts on salemnews.com have been few and far between. Working together, we can keep it that way.

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