MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 33):

The NYTimes looks at The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. NYT. Gannett is the latest Newspaper to cut headcount. SFGate. A very interesting application of Anti-Span technology used to translate text. TimesOnline

Captchas are little boxes on web pages which show a squiggly set of letters and numbers that the user is required to transcribe correctly in order to register or enter the site. They were devised eight years ago as a way of preventing computers from setting up e-mail accounts automatically which could then be used to send out spam, but a clever tweak means they are now being used to transcribe newspapers dating from the nineteenth century and earlier. Instead of displaying a random collection of letters and numbers, the newly designed Captchas present the user with a word from an old manuscript that a computer, somewhere, is having trouble deciphering.

The Telegraph reports on a half dozen interested parties moping around the Reed Business Assets. And the Informa deal is still generating some interest and the Telegraph notes Blackstone's interest in perhaps joining an existing consortium. And more from Reuters and an earlier Telegraph report. Jemima Kiss at The Guardian reports on an interesting new application in the printing industry. "In the same way that you'd use Expedia to find flights from many airlines, you'd use our service to buy exactly the prints you need from any print provider on the network." It's never too late to write that book. From the Guardian. "A raunchy novel with a dauntless heroine has transformed the lives of a 93-year-old author and three of her friends who were living in nursing homes. Pushed by her daughter-in-law, who found the manuscript and couldn't put it down, Lorna Page has become one of the oldest debut writers on record, with equally unusual social results." We did so much for everyone but now they're all against us and we were always misunderstood. The world according to Mrs. Conrad Black. TimesOnline.

But if the rich and well-connected cannot get justice, what chance for anyone else — a question I asked in columns about the law long before I married Conrad. What chance for the orange jump-suited, marginalised young men I saw shuffling in front of the judge in Chicago, silent while their court-appointed attorneys negotiated their freedom away in that tight little legal world, where a client’s fate never disturbs the bonhomie between lawyers. If ostensibly privileged defendants like us can be baselessly smeared, wrongfully deprived, falsely accused, shamelessly persecuted, innocently convicted and grotesquely punished, it does n’t take much to figure out what happens to the vulnerable and the powerless: they land, finally, in the 8:45am courtroom parade that takes place all over “America the Free” — the country that “wins” 90% of cases and imprisons more people than any other in the world.