The move is a gamble that he hopes will one day become the norm within the journalism industry. Recalling the old advertising adage, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product being sold," he wrote in the announcement, "we felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism."

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Bieber was reportedly not even in his white Ferrari when it was pulled over by California Highway Patrol for speeding — a friend of the singer was behind the wheel while Bieber was elsewhere. But the car – and Bieber's vehicular comings and goings – are familiar to local lensmen. In November, Judge Thomas Rubinson dismissed a reckless driving charge against photographer Paul Raef, who in July was involved in a high-speed freeway chase in pursuit of Bieber. At the time, Raef's frantic driving, at speeds over 80 mph, prompted several 911 calls. But Robinson ruled that a 2010 law meant to curtail that kind of potentially dangerous behavior, "in pursuit of photos for commercial gain," could conflict with legitimate First Amendment-protected news gathering.

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American James Foley, 39, was last seen on Nov. 22 in Idlib Province. Idlib has been the scene of heavy fighting in recent months between Syrian rebels and government forces.

Richard Engel, the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News, and three members of his team, went missing in the same region in December. They were freed after their captors ran into a checkpoint manned by Ahrar Al Sham, a Syrian rebel group. Engel said a firefight erupted and two captors were killed. The rebels then escorted Engel and his team to the border with Turkey.

Little is known about the group that kidnapped Engel and his team. And it remains unclear if the same group is responsible for taking James.

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Here’s what critics say about him. Lott held prestigious positions at Yale and the University of Chicago, where he published his groundbreaking book, "More Guns, Less Crime." In the early 2000s, his work fell into controversy for employing what some academic critics termed “junk science” and for various apparently fatal methodological flaws. Later, he was unable to prove the existence of a study central to his thesis. He was also caught using a fake “sockpuppet” persona to defend his work and attack his critics online. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud,” Donald Kennedy, the then-editor of the prestigious journal Science wrote in an editorial. Even Michelle Malkin said Lott had shown an “extensive willingness to deceive to protect and promote his work.”

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Based on data collected from U.S. national print outlets, 4th Estate reported:

The percentage of [front page election] articles written by Asian American reporters is 3.3%, by African American reporters is 2.9%, and by Hispanic reporters is 0.7%. This under-representation of minorities reporting on the front page holds true across most media outlets for most ethnic groups. The Dallas Morning News stands out as an exception where 18.8% of their front page stories were written by African Americans. The most striking under-representation of minorities in our data is that of Hispanic journalists, considering the Hispanic population stands at approximately 16.3% of the U.S. population (according to the 2010 Census).

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Before Beirut, we had lived in Turkey and Iraq, the latter of which was my wife Kelly's base. (She’s a correspondent for NPR.) Those weren't fun times, spending so many months apart. Among other problems, it was difficult to be a man, changing diapers, while my wife swash-buckled her way across Mesopotamia. With the mother of our daughter based in Baghdad, I learned how to excel at various domestic chores and also how to worry. What would happen if a mortar fell or if bad guys tested the glass on her armored truck? What would people think of a blonde woman traveling to Anbar Province? The Middle East, for my wife, was the big league. For me, it was a place to find a good doctor and maybe some daycare. Alone on a Friday night, I'd pour myself another glass and wonder: Was this it?

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We met over drinks before his lecture to discuss the challenges of writing about the history that we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics.

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I recently quit my job as a staff writer for a weekly newspaper. I had applied for the editor’s position, since our current editor was leaving for (much) more lucrative work outside the confines of journalism. I felt qualified for the job and had established an excellent working relationship in the community with many people. I had worked as a staff writer for almost two years at the time and felt confident that I was prepared to take on the editor’s position.

My reason for leaving my position was the fact that the publisher, who was rarely in our office, basically ignored my application for almost a month, then put me into the editor’s position as "fill-in" (his words) and offered me no pay raise, no title and no support. Rather, he denigrated me at every turn. I received approximately 20 minutes of training for the editor’s position. Even though I had worked in the publishing field for almost 15 years, my publisher told me that the "fill-in" position would afford me "valuable experience" -- apparently the 11 years I had been employed in various departments by this company hadn’t given me enough "experience" to get a promotion or a raise (by the way, my rate of pay was, from start to finish, $7.50 per hour).

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Was Mussolini Right?

"He made the trains run on time," they said about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and it was more than just a cliché. It was a statement about a government that works, a government that means what it says and does what it wants. Sure, there were some problems with the treatment of dissidents. But some very smart political analysts are asking a question that would have been surprising just a few years ago: Is it time to give fascism another try?

To be clear, no one is proposing a Fourth Reich. This isn't about Germany in the 1930s, and it isn't about genocide. It's about fascism as an economic program, where the government stops being ashamed about merging with corporate interests. It's the ultimate pro-business position, and that's why the wonks proposing a new look at an old philosophy have a catchphrase sure to draw adherents: "Fascism means jobs." If they're right, it could remake the American political landscape over the next decade.

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Cooper officially came out via a letter  to the Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan in July, where he explained his decision to come out:

I’ve begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle. It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something - something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.

Cooper echoed the same sentiments on camera yesterday, reiterating his message on the importance of transparency, "the tide of history only moves forward when everyone is fully visible."

Watch the full clip here:

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It's hard out there on the ragged edge of the economy, but take a look at GlobalPost's seven worst jobs. Earning an honest buck has never been this hard.

Henry Ford probably didn’t have China’s Foxconn factories in mind when he created his famous assembly line outside Detroit in 1913.

Eighteen Foxconn employees attempted suicide there in 2010, highlighting the job's tedious nature and poor working conditions at the facilities. Remember these workers the next time you complain about your overbearing boss.

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You can find out more about the article here. As you'll see, I cover monopolists such as Dean Singleton, Douglas Manchester and Sam Zell, and the havoc they've wreaked on cities like Denver, San Diego and Chicago, respectively. These kind of owners do not see newspaper monopolies only from a short-term financial perspective, whereby objective journalism generates profit. On the contrary, as documented in my Harper's piece, they seem to see them as political investments whose returns in influence and power come about via slanted propaganda.

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Henkin directs the MFA program at Brooklyn College and also happens to be a true gentleman: we met at a café in Park Slope where, at first, he sort of interviewed me, asking where I was from, how I grew up, and how did I like my coffee? This would have gone on, I think, for the remainder of our conversation if I hadn’t remembered we were actually there to talk about him. And so we went on to talk about King Lear, character and the family drama, MFAs, and why “show, don’t tell” is mostly bullshit.

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Darryl was severely injured. Both legs had been blown off at the knees and he lost his left arm at the elbow. Another journalist, freelance reporter Carmen Gentile, was working to stop the bleeding from the arm, fumbling with a tourniquet of his own and appearing to have a better go of it.

“How are you doing?” he shouted to me over the din of battle.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to focus. I ripped off my already tattered rubber gloves to get a better grip and started over, willing myself to be calm.

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I notice in your conversation with the veteran from Vietnam [from the Studs Terkel book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith"] he tells you right at the beginning that your interview gave him stuff he would think about for a long time. And it got me wondering about what that interview was like. How does Studs Terkel sit down with someone and get them spilling their inner selves about life and death? What's the secret?

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