Tradition of anonymous speech threatened by vicious defamatory postings

Cyberbullies have sullied Internet freedom in defamatory and cruel attacks against innocent citizens that have ruined lives. It is difficult to know what to do about it while defending the American tradition of anonymous speech, especially speech critical of the government. A Chicago lawyer makes a proposal that he thinks balances the interests of those [...]

Opinion: Google and others can perform a great public service by identifying online ‘journalism’

Writing in ZDNet, Sam Diaz says that Google, Facebook and Twitter have the information that could enable them with the help of the analysis of real journalists to identify which blog sites, tweets and news outlets should be labeled “journalism.” Diaz says “news” is different from “journalism” and the latter must be identified and labeled [...]

AOL buys The Huffington Post to bolster news content

AOL is buying The Huffington Post, a prime news site, for $315 million in an effort to improve its news gathering. The Post was seeded with only $1 million as a liberal blog and and through aggressive use of social networks has succeeded in attracting millions of visitors to its site. Writing in The New [...]

Survey shows online news supplanting print media as third most popular news venue

A survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 61 percent of readers get news online compared to 50 percent who regularly read newspapers. Seventy-eight perent view local news channels and 71 percent get news from national TV networks. -db BBC News March 1, 2010 Online news has become more popular than reading newspapers in the [...]