News

SIXTEEN PERCENT OF ADULTS IN Canada read an online newspaper each week last year--up from 10 percent in 2001, according to a new report by the Newspaper Audience Databank, Inc., the research arm of the Canadian Daily Newspaper industry. Last year alone, readership of online newspapers grew by 12 percent, according to the report, with the national newspapers drawing the largest traffic. But that...

If you read conservative blogs, you're familiar with the argument that the mainstream media buries the good news in Iraq because of their liberal bias and hatred of the president. Liberals, meanwhile, contend the press isn't showing the real horrors of the war, and suggest that a focus on insignificant "good news" would be misleading the public. (Recently, the New Republic's Jason Zengerle mocked...

NEW YORK - Popular subscription-based blogging service TypePad went offline on Friday, delaying updates to thousands of sites. Users of the system were unable to post new stories, and posts written in the last week disappeared entirely. The shutdown occurred late Thursday night as Six Apart was increasing redundancy on its disk storage. "It's kind of like lightning striking. At the point where we...

During the rush hour of Thursday morning on 7 July 2005, four bombs exploded in central London killing 56 people including four bombers. Three bombs exploded on tube trains near Aldgate East, between King’s Cross and Russell Square and, at Edgware Road London Underground tunnels. A fourth bomb went off on a crowded No.30 bus in Tavistock Square. News reporters were dispatched quickly to cover the...

Iceland, a country with just under 300,000 population has a battle royal going on between free newspapers. Frettabladid, which has been around four years, leads with 99,000 mostly home delivered copies daily, and Bladid, a free mail-delivered tabloid that started in May this year, distributes 80,000. That means enough free newspapers are available to satisfy about 64% of Iceland’s total population...

At a rally of the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon this past March, among the chants of "Death to America" and the banners lauding Syria, some of the demonstrators brandished posters that threatened, in Arabic: "We are going to sweep Gebran Tueni from Lebanon." That is what someone has now done, with the car-bombing Monday on the outskirts of Beirut that murdered the 48-year-old Tueni, who was...

Wikipedians have taken to heart the Mail & Guardian Online's recent article "Can you trust Wikipedia?" (November 10), which evaluated the quality of entries on this popular online encyclopedia. The M&G Online article looked at eight Wikipedia entries, including ones about sangomas, the media in South Africa, the African National Congress, boerewors and the country's economy. South African experts...

"If your mother says she loves you, check it out" stands as one of the most treasured journalistic maxims, a reminder that no assertion, no matter how likely it seems, should be taken at face value. Now, thanks to a volunteer online encyclopedia, we can add another: "If Wikipedia says John Seigenthaler plotted to kill the Kennedys, check it out." Wikipedia, the free digital reference book that has...

Wikipedia was yesterday described as being as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica despite a sustained attack from vandals intent on further wrecking its reputation for accuracy. In an online article published by the respected scientific journal Nature , articles in Wikipedia - the web-based encyclopaedia created by volunteers - compared favourably to those in the foremost repository of...

Vaughan Bell, a neuropsychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, UK, has reworked Wikipedia's entry on schizophrenia over the past two years. Around five others regularly contribute to the reworking, most of whom have not revealed whether they have academic backgrounds. Bell says that is not a problem, as disputes are settled through the discussion page linked to the entry, often by...