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The article profiles "Soma," a weekly English-language newspaper focusing on Kurdistan, which was launched by Tanya Goudsouzian, a McGill University graduate. According to the author, the paper was launched in the winter of 2006 with assistance from Hiro Ibrahim Ahmad, the wife of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. Goudsouzian discusses how the newspaper aims to help establish journalism standards in Kurdistan and Iraq.

This article presents the first and last campus journalism awards as selected by the author. This year's finest campus newspaper in Canada, according to me, is Quartier Libre at the Université de Montréal. And since one of the runners-up is the Link, from neighbouring Concordia University, the one-member jury of the First (and Last) Back Page Campus Journalism Awards has decided to crown Montreal as the capital of campus journalism in Canada. Both papers achieve quality by doing something that hasn't occurred to most Canadian campus papers: they take their time. Several weeks ago on my weblog I asked for samples of Canadian campus newspapers. Student scribes across the country hurried to comply, and it's been great fun to read their work. At the University of Saskatchewan, Drew Larson shot an amazing cover photo of the Arcade Fire for the Sheaf: two musicians with faces tilted up, mouths open in identical Os. Today's campus papers have too many opinion columns by students who had nothing new to say. Nobody in Canada is doing anything in English to match Quartier Libre.

This article focuses on David Radler and the illegal activities he was involved in during his partnership with Conrad Black. When David Radler became Canada's most treacherous informer last week, it was a stunning repudiation of his 36-year partnership with Conrad Black, the portentous power broker who turned himself into a weapon of mass self-destruction. Unlike Black, who courted the spotlight, Radler refused most interviews, pretending he was a simple man of God on a private mission with no name. I was one of the exceptions. He would often take me to lunch. He joined Black in buying the Sherbrooke Daily Record, where he is remembered mainly for the day an employee came into his office with a list of grievances. Instead of listening to him, Radler had two cents taken off his next paycheque for wasting a sheet of paper. He went on to create the three-man news department for his and Conrad's chain of 21 daily Sterling papers that limited editorial staff to an editor, sports writer and general reporter, with the balance of copy provided by news wires. When I asked Radler how he picked the newspapers he chose to buy, his explanation was simple. David Radler was lively and interesting, but his notion that cost-cutting constitutes great publishing is not going to win him many mourners at the tail end of his career. Now that he has agreed to plead guilty to the initial indictments aimed at the companies whose chief strategic animator he became, I hope that investigators take note of the stunning accusation made by a former publisher of the Jerusalem Post. Radler is the toughest-minded executive I ever encountered. Only facing up to 35 years of jail time brought him to heel.

This is an article that focuses on independent newspapers in Zimbabwe and the efforts of the government to repress the media. Like a middle digit raised defiantly in the face of authority, the Standard--one of Zimbabwe's last independent media voices--is located directly beneath the balconies, antennae and parabolic dishes of ZANU-PF headquarters. He's been in police custody since dawn, along with Valentine Maponga, a reporter for the paper, because of a story connecting allegations of high-level corruption with the murder of a mining executive. Deputy editor David Masunda is holding the fort, a situation he's accustomed to since Chakaodza has been arrested--but never convicted--eight times since joining the Sunday paper. An unlikely Horatio, Chakaodza was the editor of the Herald, the state-owned daily, until he started writing editorials critical of the government's use of thuggery and the way it plays the race card. Some have been beaten--in one case in a police station, on the orders of the army commander's wife--and the country's once famously independent judiciary is now packed with pro-Mugabe hacks.

Conrad Black's critics have seldom had fun or done big things -- while he can lay claim to both. Conrad Black back in the news, playing new variations on favourite themes: history, the English language, and unorthodox business practice. Lord Black of Crossharbour is in a financial mess these days. The vultures in competing British papers are circling around the still-warm form of Hollinger International, the holding company that owns London's Daily Telegraph and used to own most of Canada's larger daily newspapers. Hollinger may have to sell assets to meet its debt payments. Yet even as he tends to business, the boss devotes at least as much energy to his other passions. This has left a few skeptics wondering whether it was a good idea to use $12 million of Hollinger money to buy Franklin Delano Roosevelt's papers so Black could finish his Roosevelt biography.

The changes have been anything but conservative at Canada's unabashedly right-wing national daily. After months of speculation that CanWest Global Communications Corp. was set to fold its perennially money-losing National Post, the paper was granted a reprieve. Ken Whyte, editor-in-chief, and Martin Newland, his deputy--the duo behind the Post's cheeky mixture of agenda-driven news, pointed commentary and unapologetic fluff, have left to pursue unspecified "opportunities." Leonard Asper, CanWest chief executive, announced a three-year plan to make the paper profitable and appointed his older brother David to oversee the flagship. Matthew Fraser, a media commentator and journalism professor with no previous management experience, was named editor-in-chief. More and more Post reporters have been showing up on TV screens, and the content of the chain's daily papers across the country has become increasingly standardized--a trend that seems sure to intensify as the company struggles to get out from under a $3.6-billion debt load.

We are in a media paradox. Never have we enjoyed as much scrutiny of public officials and finances but been so condemned for insensitivity and invasion of privacy. Research conducted by the Toronto polling firm Ipsos-Reid and Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People and the Press indicates that only about 30 per cent of the public trusts the media--a figure that is likely to erode further. True, a number of significant newspapers closed during that period--the Montreal Star, Winnipeg Tribune and Ottawa Journal--but there have been new papers launched, including the National Post and the Sun chain.

Discusses the outbreak of newspaper wars as of November 1998. Mention of the launch of a national paper by Conrad Black and the following hostile takeover for the `The Toronto Sun' empire by the paper; Mention of several publishers, including John Honderich of `The Star.'

This article presents the author's experience as an intern for "Le Journal Hebdomadaire," an independent French-language magazine published in Casablanca, Morocco. I was about to start a six-month-long internship made possible by a fellowship from Ottawa's International Development Research Centre. How, I wondered, could a novice Canadian journalist contribute to one of the most daring print media in the Arab World? Le Journal Hebdomadaire (the weekly paper), which opened in 1999, is not aligned with any political party or ideology. It challenges Morocco's limits on free speech through tough investigative reporting of government corruption and taboo political topics. Morocco's 41-year-old king, Mohammed VI, who serves as political leader, Commander of the Faithful, and president of Rabat's surf club, has promised democratic reforms. As the months passed, my goal of fearlessly contributing to the advancement of press freedom was overtaken by the challenges of reporting in a foreign country. Still, I managed to write articles about Casablanca's female taxi drivers, a Moroccan playwright and an international media conference. In the wider world, it was a volatile time. The child hostages in Beslan, Russia were massacred, President George W. Bush was re-elected, Yasser Arafat died and the Southeast Asian tsunami hit. As I learned from working at Le Journal, press freedom in Morocco is fought for, word by word, deadline after deadline, sometimes with severe consequences.

This is an article about television coverage of hurricanes and of news in general. The power of pictures and the ability to marry them with compelling narrative can give TV a considerable advantage over its competitors. Keep in mind, say those who argue Cronkite's point is still valid today, that if you take a transcript of every word uttered on a TV newscast and print it on the front page of a major daily, it might not fill that space, depending of course on the size of that page one picture. In the days before it hit, the highways heading out of Florida were jammed with residents on the run, while the highways heading into Florida must have looked like a racetrack for TV satellite trucks. Much of the eventual coverage, especially from local stations, was professionally done--after all, for millions of people in the storm area, TV was the place to turn for up-to-the-minute developments, not the morning paper with its regurgitation of what happened yesterday. Watching one U.S. network the other day, a hurricane-whipped reporter was standing on an almost 45-degree angle, yelling about how careless some Floridians were to be out in such bad weather.

Opinion. Was it right or wrong for the `Winnipeg Free Press' to dip into the Finance Minister's personal notes and publish excerpts from them? The notes were inadvertently left in a hotel lobby after a press conference. The difference between the `Free Press' reporter's action, and receiving something in the mail from an unknown source is that in the second case the source is unknown. The material cannot be sent back. The reporter should have returned the papers.