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Print journalists weren’t the only ones at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who shifted with the developing story of the West Virginia miners this week. Matthew Kennedy spent the night and early morning running the paper’s online coverage of the tragedy unfolding at Sago. "Our Web site had been reflecting the course of the story," Kennedy said yesterday in a phone interview. "We had been saying that...

SAGO, W.Va. -- The storm kicked up sometime before dawn Monday, sweeping across the scabbed mountains and bare winter woods with enough ferocity to jolt people awake in this Appalachian hamlet. County Commissioner Donnie Tenney felt his blue farmhouse rattle. Thunder, he thought. The phone roused him again. It was his sister. Someone from her prayer chain had told her there had been an explosion...

There have been swift recriminations in the United States after much of the media carried the tragically wrong news that 12 of the 13 coal miners trapped in West Virginia had been found alive. News that the men had in fact died broke early on Wednesday morning, three hours after family members and the West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin had been wrongly told the miners were alive. Several US...

I cringed, along with everyone else, when I saw The Post's above-the-fold headline yesterday: "12 Found Alive in W. Va. Coal Mine." And USA Today's banner: "'Alive!' Miners Beat the Odds." And the Atlanta Journal Constitution: "12 Miners Alive." And Newsday: "Miracle in the Mine." If there's been a more heart-rending and humiliating botch of a story, I can't think of it offhand. Yes, the Chicago...

The West Virginia mine tragedy was an emotional whipsaw that ended up trapping the media – print and electronic – into authoritatively reported, but ultimately incorrect, stories. Hours after authorities announced that 12 coal miners believed to be alive were actually dead, millions awoke to newspaper headlines announcing "Miracle in the Mine" or "12 miners rescued" or simply "ALIVE!" How could...

SAGO, West Virginia (CNN) -- Just hours after news spread that 12 miners had been found alive, something wasn't right. A distraught woman, Lynette Roby, came out of the darkness and approached us with her kids while we were on air. It was a little before 3 a.m. There was this horror in Roby's eyes and this stunned outrage. She said 12 miners were dead, not alive. She said they had all been...

On Thursday, the 22th of December-2005, hundreds of Yemeni journalists launched a vital shift for a new period of time, which can be named as the period of perceiving the transfer of power and concerns of the cultured contemporary man. This principle (the peaceful transfer of power), closely linked to democracy, can remove the absolute individual governance from the path whether it is monarch...

Lloyd Peterson always wanted to be a journalist. At 15, he purchased a small printing press and began cranking out his own newspaper – The Elmora Globe in his boyhood home of Elizabeth, N.J. He delivered the 41/2- by 5-inch newspaper to his neighbors' mailboxes. The cost of local news in 1930: one penny. "I'd write about who's going to college or how they might pave North Avenue," said Peterson...

The Australian ruling elite has spent much of the holiday season eulogising the late Kerry Packer, who died December 26. Packer was Australia’s wealthiest individual, with a personal fortune estimated at $7 billion (US$5.1 billion) at the time of his death. His Publishing & Broadcasting Limited company has a range of interests spread across television, magazines, and casinos and gambling. Prime...

The Chronicle seemed to splatter itself with mud and wrap itself in honor almost all at once on Tuesday night. About 75,000 papers -- roughly a sixth of the circulation -- went out the next morning with the inspirational headline. " 'Miracle' in West Virginia." Forty-one hours after an explosion left 13 miners trapped, the accompanying story said, 12 were found alive. It's a tale that newspapers...