Squeak of the Week

The Nieman Journalism Lab chooses a single big story and reads every single version listed on Google News to see who was doing the work. Out of the 121 distinct versions of last week’s story about tracing Google’s recent attackers to two schools in China, 13 (11 percent) included at least some original reporting. And just seven organizations (six percent) really got the full story independently.

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The lawsuit essentially alleges that the heavily funded startup runs an “extortion scheme” and has “unscrupulous sales practices” in place to generate revenue, in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.

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26 artists give their naughty take on the alphabet.

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Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

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A powerful story about how shared knowledge can save lives from the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). When the Indian Ocean Tsunami hit inDecember 2004 over 250,000 people were killed throughout Asia, but on one small island, just 40km from the epicentre of the earthquake, almost the entire population survived, thanks to the people's inherited knowledge of tsunamis, handed down from each generation to the next. The 26th December 2004 looked like just another normal day on Simeulue. Eleven-year-old Anto Suryanto and his friends were on the beach playing football when the island was hit by a major earthquake. Anto tells his story and how traditional knowledge saved his life.

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