From CP via CTV.ca:

Don't believe everything you read about the imminent death of newspapers: robust growth in online advertising sales offset a mild decline in print ad revenue for Canadian papers last year, an industry trade group reported Monday.

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From the Guardian:

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

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From Reuters (April 5):

The new management team at France's establishment newspaper, Le Monde, has proposed shedding 130 staff, including a quarter of its journalists, in an effort to stem heavy losses.

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From the NYT:

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

From the Globe and Mail blurb:"The media business is challenged the world over, but nowhere more than in the United States. Enter a uniquely American saviour, Sam Zell, a man who doesn't care what's on the front page. As long as it makes money."

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In the last speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would ever give in his life, he suggested that his work on this earth might be cut short. Here's some of what he had to say on April 3, 1968 to striking garbage workers in Memphis, Tenn.

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That's some good news from the latest census data. However, there is some other data to temper that finding.

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From Reuters:

Zimbabean police on Thursday arrested two foreign journalists at a Harare hotel for covering the country's election without accreditation, police said.

"I can confirm that we have arrested two reporters at York Lodge for practising without accreditation," said police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena, who added the police would identify them on Friday.

From the BBC:

The New York Times said its Pulitzer prize winning correspondent, Barry Bearak, had been arrested.

The newspaper said it did not know where he was being held, or if there were any charges against him.

UN meteorologists say global temperatures should be slightly lower this year as a result of the La Nina phenomenon.

However, climate change deniers shouldn't necessarily rejoice.

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The peace symbol is 50.

From CBC.ca:

CBC News is shutting down the Calgary unit of its 24-hour Newsworld television service as of the end of May, and introducing additional positions for newsgathering, the public broadcaster said Thursday.

Staff in Calgary were told that the decision will result in 32 redundancies.

However, 25 new positions — largely reporters, camera operators and other field production posts — will be created in Calgary and Edmonton as part of an ongoing attempt by CBC News to boost newsgathering and local coverage by putting more "feet on the street."

The two hours of programming Calgary's Newsworld unit produced each weekday will be shifted to the Toronto bureau.

Russell Smith on the reporting deficit in the era of social news media (essentially, his take on the State of the U.S. News Media report).

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From the BBC:

A couple accused of adultery are reported to have been stoned to death in northern Pakistan by the Taleban.

The pair ran away together but after being hunted down they were brought before a Taleban court in the Mohmand tribal district.

A Taleban spokesman said the couple had confessed and were then sentenced to be put to death by stoning.

Although local officials say the pair were actually shot dead, people in the area confirm the Taleban account.

The execution was carried out in one of the tribal districts close to the Afghan border.

Many of those who like to fill up their day by denying that boosting the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing dangerous climate change often like to point to the sun as the reason we're experiencing global warming.

A new study tosses cold water on that idea.

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Here's a CTV.ca feature I wrote on whether NATO is playing for keeps in Afghanistan.

From the March 31 NYT:

Newspaper advertising revenue fell 7.9 percent in 2007, the second-worst year in more than half a century, the Newspaper Association of America said on Friday. Those figures include continued growth in online advertising.

Until last fall, the industry appeared headed for a less severe decline. But as the economy slowed, newspapers suffered a particularly bad fourth quarter — the peak period for ad sales — with revenue down 10.3 percent from a year earlier.

Revenue from ads in printed newspapers dropped 9.4 percent for the year, the biggest drop in any year since 1950, the period charted by the association.

Internet ad revenue on newspaper sites rose 18.8 percent, a marked slowdown from the torrid pace of the previous three years, when it averaged 30 percent annual growth. Online ads accounted for just 7.5 percent of all newspaper ad revenue in 2007, evidence that it will be years before digital growth outweighs the print slump.

From the Independent:

We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.

Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

The increase – from 26.5 million in 2007 – is due partly to recent efforts to increase public awareness of the programme and also a switch from paper coupons to electronic debit cards. But above all it is the pressures being exerted on ordinary Americans by an economy that is suddenly beset by troubles. Housing foreclosures, accelerating jobs losses and fast-rising prices all add to the squeeze.

Emblematic of the downturn until now has been the parades of houses seized in foreclosure all across the country, and myriad families separated from their homes. But now the crisis is starting to hit the country in its gut. Getting food on the table is a challenge many Americans are finding harder to meet. As a barometer of the country's economic health, food stamp usage may not be perfect, but can certainly tell a story.

New Yorker writer Steve Coll, author of the highly regarded 2004 book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001, has a new book on the bin Laden family: The bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.

The NYT's Michiko Kakutani reviews it.

MSM attention on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post continues, with the NYT chimming in with a story on the site that has now passed the venerable, conservervative-leaning Drudge Report in unique visitors.

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The Beeb has a list of 10 stories that probably shouldn't be published on this day of all days.