Even as violence and kidnappings are pressuring mainstream Mexican media into silence, an anonymous blog that is less than six-months-old has become one of the main sources for news about the country's out-of-control drug war, according to the Associated Press (AP). read more »

Two media companies are hoping to create networks of local bloggers in an effort to turn online journalism into a profitable venture, according to Mathew Ingram of the technology blog GigaOM. read more »

Yahoo on Tuesday, July 6, unveiled a news blog, called The Upshot, with content created based on what Internet users are searching for, The New York Times reported.

Common search words, phrases and topics will be analyzed, and from there the blog's two editors and six writers will use that data to decide what kinds of news will be covered, the Times explained. read more »

First he went on TV and radio. Next, he started tweeting. Now, President Chávez has launched an official blog to communicate with Venezuelans, ABC and Europa Press report. read more »

Dania García left the prison where she had been incarcerated for two weeks after being sentenced to 20 months for a “family dispute," the Associated Press and EFE report. This was the first case of a blogger being arrested on the island. read more »

Spanish journalist Judith Torrea has spent 12 years working as an independent journalist. Last year she created the blog “Ciudad Juárez, en la sombra del narcotráfico” (Ciudad Juárez, in the shadow of narcotrafficking), where she reports on the crimes of drug mafias, stories that traditional media aren't always able to tell. read more »

The five French-speaking broadcast journalists who will confine themselves to an isolated farmhouse in southwest France next week for the experiment "Behind closed doors on the Net" include reporter Janic Tremblay of Radio Canada in Montreal and colleagues from France, Belgium and Switzerland. read more »

Cuba's government and its leader have begun to grasp the importance of eliminating or intimidating bloggers, recognizing the need to treat them differently than the previous generation of "independent" journalists, Sánchez writes on her site, Generación Y. (See English version.) read more »

Havana is fighting its enemies online but finding it difficult to combat critics like blogger Yoani Sánchez, who use Internet to express themselves, Juan Tamayo writes for the Miami Herald. But supporters of the government are using the same medium to respond. read more »

The island’s blogging community has gained more attention recently due to its online protest last month and the difficulties faced by blogger Yoani Sánchez, who was prohibited from traveling to receive an award, and last week reported being detained and beaten by Cuban security agents. read more »

Citing a “handful of sources,” the NGO Article XIX adds the case of blogger Alexis Marrero to the increasing attacks on the press by the government of President Hugo Chávez. A warrant for his arrest was issued at the end of July, though he has yet to be taken into custody. read more »

Traditional news outlets lead the news cycle, and blogs follow about 2.5 hours later, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web. The study was conducted by researchers at Cornell University during the last three months of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Steve Lohr reports for The New York Times. read more »

Many unknown writers in Argentina who have joined the blogosphere are winning awards and seeing their online writing turn into books, plays and screenplays, Marcela Valente reports for Inter Press Service (IPS). read more »

In the United States today, there are almost as many people making their life from blogging as there are lawyers, columnist Mark Penn writes in The Wall Street Journal. More people in the U.S. are already earning their primary income from posting their opinions than working as computer programmers or firefighters, he says. read more »

President-elect Mauricio Funes and his FMLN party endured what many analysts have called “the fiercest, most expensive and dirtiest media campaign in Salvadoran history,” Roberto Lovato writes for New America Media. read more »

Whether they criticize President Uribe or his opponents, bloggers from Bogotá and other cities employ irreverent humor—borrowing from the British and Argentine traditions—to illustrate Colombia's political tensions. “Behind the liberty that their pseudonyms give them, (the bloggers) loosen the reins of their political passions," the weekly magazine Semana says. read more »

The Voces Bolivianas (Bolivian Voices) project, which teaches citizens’ media skills to underrepresented communities in Bolivia, is planning its first summit, “Web 2.0 for Everyone,” from Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2009, in the city of Cochabamba. See the summit’s website (in Spanish) here. read more »

Despite setting two alarms and ordering a hotel wakeup call, CNN political reporter Candy Crowley is so scared to oversleep while covering the Obama campaign, that she usually awakens on her own, long before any alarm. Crowley and other reporters tell The New Republic that they're looking forward to more time at home, doing routine things like movies and the grocery store. read more »

Longtime newspaper columnist Mirko Lauer of La Republica criticized instant messaging and micro-blogs such as Twitter, for promoting the diffusion of cyber-insults.

"A website called Twitter offers its readers a constantly updated collection of insults from everywhere, and it's not alone," he wrote. "It's an established convention that the etiquette of commentaries on Internet is that there's no etiquette." read more »

The weather reports about Hurricane Gustav did not persuade Sheila Moragas to leave her home in a suburb west of New Orleans. It was the 38-year-old mother’s shrinking number of online friends on the Twitter micro-blogging network that convinced her on Sunday that it was time to evacuate, writes James Janega of the Chicago Tribune. read more »