The world didn't exactly shake when Betsy Daly stopped going to Blockbuster a year ago, but the movie-rental giant would be smart to ask itself whether this 33-year-old San Jose, Calif., mom represents the future. Daly now pays $15 a month to order her DVDs online. They arrive in the mail in a day or two, she gets to keep two at once , and she mails them back whenever she feels like it. "I love that the movie can ...

"The first thing I noticed was that she was ripped up like a pig in the market," her entrails "flung in a heap about her neck." Thus the account in London's Star newspaper of the policeman who found the body of Catherine Eddowes, a prostitute murdered in the autumn of 1888 by the serial killer the media dubbed "Jack the Ripper." But if the Ripper's notoriety was fueled by a fiercely competitive media market with newspapers trying ...

The big reveal has been revealed: Pottermore is ... an interactive thingy. A website, with assorted digital services. Harry Potter fans can enter and be sorted by the Hat and wanded by Ollivander. We can look at new images from the books As for the rest of it ... I'll admit it, it makes me a little melancholy, just as the Wizarding World of Harry Potter made me melancholy. There are two things that separate ...

At first, the amateur video shows a normal evening in the seething valley town of Apatzingn, in Mexico's western Michoacn state. But as residents and stall owners mix jovially on the sidewalk, the calm is broken by the sudden, sinister appearance of masked men gripping machine guns mounted on more than 50 pickup trucks, Hummers and Jeeps. The gangsters cruise openly down Apatzingn's main drag, a frightening show of force even by the brutal standards of Mexico's ...

At this year's Grammys, the five nominees for Album of the Year have something peculiar in common: they were all were mixed or engineered by graduates of Full Sail University. In fact, this year's Grammy-nominated projects were worked on by 74 alums of Full Sail U in total. Full who? Full Sail University, a.k.a. the other FSU, is located in Winter Park, Fla., near Orlando. The for-profit college, which was founded in 1979 and originally located ...

Anytime a bunch of politicians go on television to eat cucumbers, you know something is up. On Monday, there was Clara Aguilera, agriculture councilwoman for the region of Andalucia, pointedly biting into a whole cuke. A day later it was the turn of Mariano Rajoy, head of Spain's opposition Popular Party, and Esperanza Aguirre, president of the regional government of Madrid to do the same with a mercifully sliced version. These days, the local media is full ...

The angry, aggressive crowd formed within minutes of my arrival. Dozens of Muslim men, all in ankle-length galabias, came together in the middle of the dusty dirt path leading to the Church of the Two Martyrs in this poor Christian and Muslim village some 130 miles south of Cairo. They were determined to block access to what has become a sectarian sore: a church overrun by Muslim locals and desecrated, an act that has prompted desperate ...

Correction appended April 28, 2010 This time last year, Somali pirates dominated headlines in the U.S. The hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, a tanker captained by an American, led to a made-for-Hollywood intervention by sharp-shooting Navy SEALS and triggered a media frenzy about the rise of piracy off the Horn of Africa. In the months that followed, a U.S.- and E.U.-led naval task force stepped up patrols around Somalia's coastline and lessened the threat posed by pirates there. ...

Word to those who think the Internet spells the end of traditional print media: "hacker journalists" have arrived to save the day. A cadre of newly minted media whiz kids, who mix high-tech savvy with hard-nosed reporting skills, are taking a closer look at ways in which 21st century code-crunching and old-fashioned reporting can not only coexist but also thrive. And the first batch of them has just emerged from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. They've just ...

The days grow short. A cold wind stirs the fallen leaves, and some mornings the vineyards are daubed with frost. Yet all across France, life has begun anew: the 2007 harvest is in. And what a harvest it has been. At least 727 new novels, up from 683 for last autumn's literary rentre. Hundreds of new music albums and dozens of new films. Blockbuster art exhibitions at all the big museums. Fresh programs of concerts, operas and plays in the ...