From a January 28 Politico article titled, “James O'Keefe and accomplices trained in conservative journalism” [emphasis added]:

The four young men arrested this week in an apparent plot to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office had been groomed for years to be part of a new wave of activist conservative journalists by a series of influential and often deep-pocketed benefactors.

But their recent exploits and now their arrests have troubled some of those supporters. And they are now questioning the kind of guerilla journalism that connected the four young men and that many conservative activists celebrated when one of those arrested, James O'Keefe, secretly videotaped ACORN employees last year as they appeared to encourage him and a partner, posing as a pimp and prostitute, to circumvent the law.

“There is a responsible way to creatively generate a story or an incident which challenges the left in an ethical, yet aggressive way,” said Steven Sutton, who heads campus journalism outreach at the conservative non-profit Leadership Institute in Arlington, Va., where O'Keefe worked in 2006 and early 2007 training right-leaning students on how to start and run publications. Sutton supervised O'Keefe at the institute until O'Keefe was asked to leave because his investigative work could interfere with the Institute's Internal Revenue Service standing.

“Then there's the other way, where you cross the line - and we teach people not to do that - and you expose yourself, whatever organization you're affiliated with, and the people that you're associated with to a deserved and justified backlash,” Sutton said.

[...]

In an interview posted last week on a website affiliated with the Leadership Institute, O'Keefe espoused his philosophy to conservative student journalists, telling them to push conventions.

“Don't just respond to news, but actually create your own headlines,” he said. “Make demands upon your professors. Make demands upon your university to actually change things. Don't just wait for something to happen and sit back and report on it.”

The institute, which trains conservatives in activist journalism and more general organizing techniques, provided hands-on training and $500 apiece to O'Keefe and two of his alleged co-conspirators - Joe Basel and Stan Dai, both 24 - while they were still college students to help them start conservative newspapers at Rutgers University, the University of Minnesota-Morris and George Washington University, respectively.

But Sutton said that what O'Keefe, 25, did with his ACORN videos - and what is he is accused of doing in New Orleans - crossed the line and “is not something that we teach here.”