Media in Middle East & North Africa

Daily newspapers will become a thing of the past for readers in four Michigan markets, with issues being printed only three days a week in Flint, Saginaw and Bay City, and twice weekly in Ann Arbor. Advance Publications said it would close the 174-year-old Ann Arbor News in late July, and replace it with two new corporate entities: a primarily Web-based news operation, AnnArbor.com; and a printing company that will publish two days a week.

the news business as we've known it for generations is changing and will continue to change in ways we can't possibly imagine now.I accept that and even embrace it. Yet at the same time, I can't help but wonder how we can recover what is almost certain to be lost in this revolution: a sense of shared knowledge of our communities.

I think we're reaching the point when we need some technology that helps us filter, sort and make sense of the river of data that we swim in every day.There used to be something like that. It was called a newspaper.

I believe people still want what newspapers have provided: a sense of being presented with important, useful and enjoyable information, culled from many sources and thoughtfully organized.Like Clay Shirky, I don't know what online form that might take. And given the economics of the Web, it may be that nobody can make a living producing it.

Over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to surveys taken from 2006-2008. Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the "Net Generation," internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life. Generation X is the most likely group to bank, shop, and look for health information online. Boomers are just as likely as Generation Y to make travel reservations online. And even Silent Generation internet users are competitive when it comes to email (although teens might point out that this is proof that email is for old people).

Peretz doesn't seem to know what a blog is or to realize that it wasn't PBS that made me prominent, but "Informed Comment" and my daily commentary and reportage here. And, it generated lots of television, not just the Lehrer News Hour. I have been on ABC Evening News, Nightline, the Today Show, CNN Headline News, Anderson Cooper 360, Wolf Blitzer, John Gibson's Big Country (yes, on Fox), Keith Olbermann, Ron Reagan, the History Channel, etc., etc. Lehrer has hardly been alone among television journalists in valuing my perspective.Peretz has smeared Jim Lehrer, indeed, libelled him, along with Ray Suarez, Margaret Warner and Gwen Ifill (all of whom have interviewed me), and must apologize. Now.

ten conclusions that might guide a country's development of a culturally appropriate Internet policy

Do not spend vast sums of money to buy machinery that you are going to set down on top of existing dysfunctional institutions. The Internet, for example, will not fix your schools. Perhaps the Internet can be part of a much larger and more complicated plan for fixing your schools, but simply installing an Internet connection will almost surely be a waste of money.

Learning how to use the Internet is primarily a matter of institutional arrangements, not technical skills

commissioned by the Turkish General Staff and distributed in recent months by the education ministry. It is an attempt to counter what Turkey calls "baseless" claims that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against the Armenians in 1915. The DVD was sent to all elementary schools with a note instructing teachers to show it to pupils and report back.

"They're promoting discrimination, branding certain people as 'others' and teaching children to do the same. My daughter will not be part of this enmity."

"We teach children who our enemies are and which countries tried to divide up our territory, but we don't teach them about the Armenians. "So I thought this film was good, and objective."

Studies by sociologists in recent years show that women are becoming increasingly aware of how the law discriminates against them.

When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.

This is an edited version of an article published in the Sunday Leader editorial column on 11 January. Its author, who co-founded the paper in 1994, was killed three days earlier by unidentified gunmen as he drove to work. He is believed to have written the editorial just days before his death.