The Toronto Star's Geoff Pevere on the proliferation of the first-person doc, something not invented by Michael Moore, but someone who did give it commercial legs. And he did it all, say his critics, by putting compelling story before truth.

When the Virginia Tech shooting occurred, a number of major news organizations went to Google and Yahoo! and immediately bought keywords relating to it, paying up to 20 cents per clickthrough.

The Beeb's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes gets invited to visit a US$20 million "cottage" in a secluded Moscow suburb, one packed with other such modest dwellings belonging to other plutocrats.

Allies of Russia's President Vladimir Putin are setting out some ground rules for their newly-acquired Russian News Service.

Globeandmail.com has soft-launched its new look. The official launch date for the redesigned newspaper is Monday, April 23.

First, here's a look at globeandmail.com's old design (reconstructed from archive.org's May 30, 2006 capture):

Imagine Virginia Tech University senior Alice Mathias's surprise when she clicked on an online video of school shooter Cho Seung-Hui's final statement and had to sit through a 30-second Bank of America ad first.

If you haven't seen it, here's U.S. Sen. (and presidential hopeful) John McCain responding to a question about sending an "airmail message" to Iran.

It brings to mind Ronnie Raygun's old chestnut about Russia (and here's the music video version).

New results from the New York Times Co., Gannett and the Tribune Co. show major newspaper properties continuing to suffer as ad dollars continue to desert print for the Web.

From nytimes.com:

Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News” told PBS’s Charlie Rose on Tuesday that the shootings at Virginia Tech proved that viewers still wanted traditional network anchors.

Most don’t need more than one, however.

The excruciatingly close-up and continuous coverage of the massacre helps explain why viewers are increasingly turning to Charles Gibson of ABC. When it comes to an anchor’s presence at a major breaking story, less can be more.

And particularly in the middle of so wrenching a tragedy, tone matters as much as content. Hurricane Katrina, even more than 9/11, emboldened television newscasters to fold themselves and their feelings into the story, and that has led to the Anderson Cooperization of the evening news.

Network anchors often behave as if they are the nation’s grief counselors. One reason that Mr. Gibson has been gaining in the ratings could be that he acts like the nation’s newsman.

Mr. Williams and CBS’s Katie Couric were in Blacksburg, Va., on Monday, the day of the shootings — CBS that night extended the evening newscast to a full hour. Mr. Gibson, who didn’t arrive on the scene until Tuesday and delegated many interviews to ABC colleagues, was better than either of his rivals at keeping an even keel. His interview with a group of survivors on Tuesday night was more bearable to watch, mostly because his questions, posed in a kindly but neutral manner, solicited information, not emotion.

“And how would you describe his facial manner and demeanor?” Mr. Gibson asked, referring to the gunman. “Could you feel him pushing against the door?” Perhaps relieved to be asked for facts and not just their feelings, the students delivered both.

Much backlash against NBC on over its decision to broadcast excerpts of the Virginia Tech University gunman's last ramblings.

From AP via globeandmail.com:

The Chicago Tribune has launched a community journalism Web site encouraging readers in nine suburbs to post their own articles, photos and blogs.

“This started with the question of how can we make the paper more relevant to readers who continue to live further and further away from the center city,” said Ted Biedron, president of the Tribune division that designed the site.

The Web site www.triblocal.com was announced in Thursday's edition of the newspaper.

Triblocal will have a staff of four journalists, but the majority of the site's content will be written by readers.

Biedron said sites like News Corp.'s MySpace.com have persuaded publishers that there is value in allowing readers to publish their own content.

From CP via the Hamilton Spectator:

A Muslim journalist beaten with a cricket bat outside a Mississauga home is living in fear after repeated death threats because someone has deemed his writing to be anti-Islam.

Jawaad Faizi, 35, a columnist for the weekly Urdu-language Pakistan Post based in New York, suffered cuts and bruises in the attack, which has alarmed his wife and three children.

The Pakistan Post is published in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary as well as in 16 major American centres.

There's more at this Editor and Publisher story:

During the attack, Faizi said, the men told him to stop writing critically of the religious organization Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran and its leader, Cleric Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri. Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri is a frequent visitor to Canada, CJFE said.

Here's the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression news release.

From the BBC:

"Our intelligence services have confirmed to me that he's alive," Mr Abbas (Mahmoud, the Palestinian president) told reporters in Sweden.

(Alan) Johnston, 44, has not been seen since he was seized at gunpoint on his way home in Gaza City on 12 March.

On Sunday, an unknown militant group said it had killed him, but the BBC said and Palestinian officials said they could not verify the claim.

Mr Abbas said he knew which group was holding Mr Johnston but did not give any details.

In Gaza, a senior security official said the earlier reports of Mr Johnston's death were unfounded.

I did a backgrounder for the Virginia Tech University shootings: Common threads run through school shooters.

The most haunting part of the story is this quote that U of T psychology prof Jordan Peterson read me from Milton's Paradise Lost as a way of explaining the mindset of such people:

"'The more I see pleasures around me, so much more I feel torment within me as from the hateful siege of contraries. All good to me becomes bane. And in heaven, much worse would be my state. ... Only in destroying do I find ease to my relentless thoughts.'"

And on a much, much lighter note, here's a preview of the Hot Docs festival: Hot Docs festival to offer 'feisty' lineup.

I got the big question out of the way fast:

Will this be the best Hot Docs ever?

"It's always the 'best Hot Docs ever'," Sean Farnel, director of programming, told CTV.ca with a laugh.

From Yahoo! News:

Popular online hangout MySpace entered the news business -- http://news.myspace.com (beta) -- Thursday with a feature that lets its users determine what items other members see.

MySpace News brings to a much larger audience the user-recommendation capabilities already available through Digg and Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape. It also marks the site's further inroads into becoming an Internet portal akin to Yahoo Inc. and others.

Unlike Digg and Netscape, which rely heavily on user submissions, MySpace will also scan thousands of Web journals and news sites and group results by categories such as sports and politics. MySpace will go further than Google Inc.'s news offering by letting users vote on items, helping to determine what makes the front or section pages.

As part of the service, MySpace will pull and display headlines from the outside news sites, a practice that contributed to legal challenges against Google. The search engine leader recently reached a settlement with Agence France-Presse and earlier with The Associated Press, although no lawsuit had been filed by the AP.

From the BBC:

Civilians in Afghanistan are increasingly facing suicide attacks, abductions and beheadings, according to a leading human rights group.

A report by Amnesty International says that attacks on civilians are widespread and systematic, and are used by Taleban rebels to instil fear.

The report says that scores of civilians have been deliberately killed by the Taleban in the past two years.

It accuses the Taleban of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity".

Targets between January 2005 and March 2007 have included women's rights activists, election candidates, clerics, government and health workers and teachers.

At least 183 schools were burned in arson attacks across the country between 2005-2006.

Two Egyptian women who worked as newsreaders for state TV want to wear veils on air. Their employer has issues with that. So do some Egyptians.

From the BBC:

Staff at an Afghan television station in the capital, Kabul, have protested against a raid by armed police who allegedly assaulted workers there.

Dozens of journalists and Members of Parliament demonstrated outside parliament against the raid.

They accused President Hamid Karzai of smothering freedom of speech during Tuesday's raid at Tolo TV.

MP and former journalist Shukria Barakzai accused the authorities of having no respect for the law.

"It's a small example for journalists in Afghanistan. We face lots of violence," he told the rally outside parliament.

BBC visitors have not lost their fascination with the goat marriage story.

See here for context.

From FishOntario.com:

The dried-up river in question is the Jackpine, which flows into Lake Superior about 24 km east of Nipigon.

The story poses this question: Can Ontario's trout survive climate change? 

The unfortunate answer is, probably not over the longer term. Trout require cold water, and that's becoming an ever-scarcer resource. Another interesting visual element deeper in the story is the spread of small and largemouth bass populations in northwest Ontario (the images show the differences between 1930, 1950 and 2000). Bass are a warmwater species.

However, I suspect it's not just Ontario. When I went fishing on the Bow River (one of the world's great trout fisheries) last summer just southeast of Calgary, I noticed that side channels that used to have fishable water were bone-dry.

Farther north in Alberta, around Lesser Slave Lake, all the streams appeared to be way down. One fishing operator said the walleye were in deep, deep water trying to escape the heat.

And when I went fishing around Hazelton, B.C. in that province's northwest, I was told the rivers were at 20-year lows.

The temperature of B.C.'s Fraser River was getting to be near-lethal for sockeye salmon last August (it cooled just before the famed Adams River run started making its way upstream).

This may well be a widespread phenomenon. We really should see this as disconcerting.

Here's the full news release.

Here's the Pulitzer website (it's framed - agghh!!).

Here's the NYT story. The paper's coverage graciously highlighted the two Pulitzers won by the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal won the Pulitzer Prize for public service yesterday for uncovering the unethical practices of business executives who had rewarded themselves millions of dollars by backdating stock options. The articles, by Charles Forelle, James Bandler, Mark Maremont and Steve Stecklow, have led to the federal investigation of more than 130 companies, and at least 70 top executives have lost their jobs.

In awarding The Journal its highest journalistic honor, the Pulitzer Prize Board said the paper had brought about “widespread change in corporate America.”

The Journal also won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, for a series of articles about the adverse effects of industrial development on China. The Journal was the only newspaper to win more than one award.

A report released on the weekend criticized a group of U.S. Marines in Afghanistan who went on a 12-kilometre-long shooting spree earlier this winter.

Gregg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher wrote about parts of the report that dealt with the U.S. military's decision to censor some AP journalists: (via truthout)

A freelance photographer working for The AP and a cameraman working for AP Television News said then a U.S. soldier deleted their photos and video showing a four-wheel drive vehicle in which three people were shot to death about 100 yards from the suicide bombing. The AP lodged a protest with the American military.

The military defended their action in a letter to the AP later, stating that images gathered by "untrained people" might "capture visual details that are not as they originally were." But the Afghan commission concluded that there were "not sufficient grounds to justify the substantial curtailment of the right to freedom of expression, especially as the loss of information caused by these actions was directly harmful to the successful undertaking of a genuinely impartial investigation."

From the NYT:

YouTube may be best known for showing video clips from its users of hamsters’ pratfalls or attempts to don as many T-shirts as possible. Starting today, it will also become an easy way to view content from Al Jazeera English, the English-language version of the Qatar-based television news station.

Al Jazeera introduced its English language version in November but has been unable to secure a deal with a cable television company to broadcast nationwide. Critics accuse Al Jazeera, which is available in the United States through satellite television or the Internet, of spreading anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda.

But to YouTube, Al Jazeera English is just another “branded channel” that provides video content, much the way the National Hockey League, Capitol Records and the BBC do.

Here's the Al-Jazeera YouTube Channel link.

And here's the Al-Jazeera website.

Finally, here's video of The Daily Show's Samantha Bee and her attempts to make A-J Amero-friendly (warning: takes forever to load).

From the NYT:

Americans may have more news outlets today than two decades ago, but they still don’t know much more about current events than they did then, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

But here’s one big difference: the survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what’s going on — who were able to identify major public figures, for example — were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”; those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news. ...

A Palestinian group claimed Sunday it has killed BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston. But the Beeb itself is saying there's no proof and no confirmation.

Some top retired U.S. generals are warning of the looming threat posed to U.S. national security by climate change. But Dubya didn't listen to these guys while they served, so why start now?

Josh Wolff, who spent more time in a U.S. jail for not co-operating with a prosecutor than any other U.S. journalist ever, talked to Salon:

The first round of voting in the French presidential elections takes place in one week. A hot-button issue for the three main candidates -- not to mention French society -- are the banlieues, the impoverished suburbs that ghettoize immigrants, mainly North African Muslims from former French colonies.

News junkies and Globe and Mail watchers simply must circle April 23 on their calendars. The organization will unveil its redesigned newspaper, website and a rebranded business news website, ReportonBusiness.com (which presently redirects to the existing globeandmail.com business hub page).