So let me talk a little bit about our social media guidelines as a newsroom, and mine individually.

Earlier this week, the newsroom staff had a great lunchtime discussion about how our personal and professional lives intersect on social media networks. We updated the newsroom’s ethics policy over the summer and added a social media section for the first time, and one thing is already clear — it needs to be more specific to give our staff more guidance in how to use networks like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace without compromising our credibility as a journalists (and, by extension, The Eagle’s).

Earlier this month, Mashable.com quoted a study in which more than half of employers surveyed block social media sites on work computers. At The Eagle, I believe that connecting to these networks, especially within our community, is an increasingly important part of our job. I encourage our staff to be engaged in digital community conversations as part of their job. And to do it with the same sound ethical guidelines we’ve adhered to in the print business for many decades.

The use of social media is evolving so rapidly, though, that stories are abundant of people who have harmed their careers and their employers’ reputations by exercising poor judgment in Tweets, blog posts or Facebook updates. Being a news organization just adds an extra few layers of complication, and we don’t yet have all the answers on how to handle every situation that can arise. Our guidelines and practices will change as we make mistakes, or discover ethical dilemmas we hadn’t anticipated.

In our discussion last week, I told our staff that I won’t issue rules on who they should or should not invite or accept as Facebook friends. Common sense should guide decisions for journalists who use Facebook as a mix of personal friends/family and professional connections. It’s common for journalists to have professional acquaintances connected to them on Facebook. I view it as a great compliment to our staff that readers and sources in the community want to have connections to our staff on social networks — they see our writers, editors, visual journalists, etc., as approachable, or they wouldn’t want to connect to them.

Some of us are, frankly, unsure how far to go in opening the doors of our Facebook pages. We’re figuring it out as we go, and, at least for me, practices change over time as use of the social network grows. It’s not that there are hoards of people banging at my Facebook door by any means. And I don’t have earth-shattering posts on my Facebook page (and I don’t update it often enough — I’m working on it). But I do have family members there, and my vacation photos, and conversations with close friends.

So a month or two ago I decided that I was not going to connect with people on Facebook if I don’t know them. It’s not meant as a slight to anyone. I just consider it something of an extension of my personal space, and I want to make sure that I know who the people are who are stopping by. At the same time, I’m not willing to suggest to Eagle staff members with their practice should be. That needs to be a personal decision. I do, though, ask that they be aware of the implications of people they might accept or invite as friends, and the potential for those connections to reflect on them in their role as a journalist.

Twitter is a much more open space, in my view, and I follow people there whom I have never met in person.

We’ll be working on a more specific social media policy in the coming weeks. If you wonder what other companies — both inside and outside the media business — have established for policies, Mashable points to a great directory of policies at Social Media Governance.

Here’s a note posted Friday by Nick Jungman, our deputy editor for interactive:

You might have noticed that we’ve changed a few things on the Kansas.com home page.

We’ve been working for weeks to develop a new home page for the site that is cleaner and more organized. The often chaotic jumble of information we used to have on the home page has given way to a categorized, calmer design. We think it’s a vast improvement.

But we know changes like this can be disorienting for our readers. We’ll certainly be making changes in the coming days based on your feedback, as well as extending some of these changes to other pages of the site. If you’re having trouble finding anything, or have any suggestions you’d like us to consider, please pass them along. You can e-mail us at webmaster@wichitaeagle.com or sound off in the comments below.

Are you confused on whether a subordinate clause is a part of speech or one of Santa’s elves?

Don’t worry. We’re here to help.

The copy desk at The Wichita Eagle is known for its sense of humor and spirited discussions on usage, grammar and style.

Starting Monday, we’re sharing that knowledge and sense of fun through The Eagle’s first podcast on Kansas.com: the Grammar Monkeys.

Each week we’ll tackle a new topic. First up is one of the most common usage errors, lay vs. lie.

Impress your friends with your knowledge and my bosses with our number of downloads by going to http://blogs.kansas.com/grammar every Monday.

If you have grammar questions you want us to address, write us at grammarmonkeys@wichitaeagle.com.

Marcia Werts, an assistant metro editor, and Nick Jungman, deputy editor/interactive, did most of the work to bring you searchable profiles on 713 candidate running in 410 races in Sedgwick, Butler, Harvey and Sumner counties. Along with biographical information, profiles include candidate responses on key election issues. We were able to create this site with a lot of hard work by Marcia, Nick and other newsroom staffers, plus a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to our Web partner, E-ThePeople.org, to build the site with us.

Feedback on the site has been terrific, and to answer a couple of readers’ questions: yes, we plan to do it again for the November elections. Several readers appreciated that the “build your ballot” feature found candidates for them when they weren’t sure which district they lived in for a particular office. Another woman wrote, “Because of this site I was able to persuade my husband to peruse his parties races and to do an advance vote in the primary since we will be in Colorado on the day of the election.”

The way we see it, that’s the ultimate success for us with this election toolkit: Giving citizens the information they need to help them take part in the democratic process. To all who dropped me a note, thanks for the feedback.

In addition, we send tweets through the day with Wichita Eagle headlines.

O’Brien’s right that there are some drawbacks to Twitter as a breaking news source – but also some significant reasons for newsrooms to plug in to a new way of sending information out and getting information in from people who are seeing news happen.

While that occasionally sets a comment poster into a rant about censorship, we want this web site to be about civil, constructive and meaningful conversation. No one has a given right to use this site to post comments that are offensive.  The Web is wide open for you to create your own site if that’s the conversation you want to have.

If you’re a site user who is bugged by comments that you find off-topic or offensive, please don’t hesitate to flag them for review. We’ll be glad to do that to keep these pages open for civil communication.

You can find the e-Eagle from the Kansas.com home page each day by clicking on the link near the top left-hand rail.

The decrease in calls from angry readers is open to interpretation, but one probable explanation is that a dominant majority of our readers access stocks information on the Web, from Kansas.com or one of dozens of other sites that offer up-to-the-minute quotes.

I do understand why those 200 readers are angry. A reader named Melinda left me a voice mail asking me to share the numbers of complaints and subscription cancellations we’ve had. She’s furious that we dropped the listings, and hopes other stock-users have joined her in protest. I’ve had the same feeling toward companies I’m angry at – and I’ve hoped that thousands of people joined me in protesting a decision I didn’t like about rates, service or products.

In this case, though, we’ve had one subscription cancellation. A caveat: Unless a reader specifies that he/she is canceling because of stock listings, I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a cancellation to the stocks decision. However, so far, we’ve seen no spike in general cancellations.

None of that means we don’t care that we’ve upset readers. We do. I recognize that some of our readers don’t have computers, or don’t want to be tied to them for news. Because we serve tens of thousands of readers each day, we have to focus our available space on features that are of use and interest to the widest range of readers. I know that explanation doesn’t hold much water when you’re angry or your routine has been upended – and I’ve been on the other side of unpopular decisions as a consumer. Our hope is that readers find much more value than stock listings to bring them back to the printed paper each morning.