Newspaper

By day, Sarah Tressler was a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. By night, she was an exotic dancer. That's what got her fired, she says. Tressler, 30, has filed a gender discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission  alleging that the Houston Chronicle wrongly fired her from her job as a society reporter, according to the Associated Press. Tressler says she was told she failed to reveal her side job on her employment application.

BEIRUT - Syrian President Bashar Assad has expressed skepticism that a planned U.S.-Russian peace conference could help stop the bloodshed in his country, according to an interview published Saturday in an Argentine newspaper. The Syrian leader also repeated assertions that he had no intention of stepping down from office. "We have welcomed the Russian-United States rapprochement, and we hope that there is an international meeting to help the Syrians overcome the crisis," Assad told the Argentine daily Clarin in his first public comments on the U.S.-Russian initiative.

I just read your article about the Star Free Press obtaining the Camarillo Daily News and the Simi Enterprise in the Sept. 15, 1992, Valley Business section. I believe the story was excellent except for one fact. Continually, you talked about the five daily newspapers in Ventura County, forgetting that a sixth daily newspaper does exist in Ventura County, and that is the Santa Paula Chronicle. We may be the smallest newspaper in Ventura County, but we are a Monday through Friday daily newspaper and have been the Santa Paula newspaper since 1887.

LAREDO, Texas -- A recent wave of kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo was prominently featured in a recent Sunday edition of El Mañana, one of the largest and most long-standing Spanish-language newspapers on the border. But the story carried no byline, and no residents were quoted or pictured. "People don't want to go out for interviews - they say, 'No, we may get kidnapped,'" said Ninfa Cantú Deándar, who runs the paper with her siblings. Because of threats from Mexican cartels, the paper - published in the twin cities of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas - is operating very differently these days.

MEXICO CITY -- Gunmen shot at the offices of El Diario de Juarez newspaper early Wednesday in the latest attack against a news organization in northern Mexico and days after an editor was killed near the U.S. border. No one was injured when gunmen driving past the paper's Ciudad Juarez offices fired seven rounds from a pistol just after 1 a.m., piercing windows, El Diario reported (link in Spanish). Fifteen minutes later, shots were fired at the city's Canal 44 news station. Nine people were held for questioning late Wednesday in connection with the attack after local authorities and Chihuahua state Gov. Cesar Duarte pledged to find the assailants.

The longtime campus newspaper at UC Irvine may be forced to cease printing in the next year if students fail to approved a quarterly fee to help sustain the weekly publication. Like newspapers across the country, rising printing costs have forced UCI's weekly New University to cut back, according to the paper's student editor. Once a robust 60-page newspaper, the paper has shrunk to 24 pages in the last six years and editors  have had their compensation chopped in half, now earning between $24 and $50 a week.

The pen, it's sometimes said, is mightier than the sword. For these women, it's also a ticket to respect. Khabar Lahariya, or "News Waves," is India's first newspaper written, read and run by tribal women and those from the Dalit, or so-called untouchable, caste. While most readers only know of the politics, crime, or education news in the 8-page weekly, each of the writers has a story of her own about struggling against life's harsh challenges. Many of the dozen or so women on staff were beaten or sexually abused as children, married off young, endured abusive marriages and fought mightily for an education and a divorce.

Sikh extremists shot and killed three men Thursday for selling pro-Hindu newspapers in northern Punjab state, police said. Two newspaper agents were shot at Mohali, five miles from Chandigarh, the Punjab capital, as they were about to pick up newspaper bundles.

Al Neuharth, the newspaper mogul who in 1982 made a $1-billion gamble called USA Today that earned derision for its emphasis on brevity, flashy graphics and upbeat stories but endured to become the nation's largest-circulation newspaper, died Friday in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. He died of complications from a recent fall, according to USA Today and the Newseum, the Washington, D.C., news museum he founded. Described by detractors and admirers as brutish, egomaniacal, brilliant and fiercely competitive, Neuharth was a latter-day Citizen Kane, who in the 1970s turned the small Gannett newspaper chain into the nation's most profitable newspaper company.

It's not even 10 inches tall, it's just one-third of an inch thick, and it costs nearly $500. But Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle DX, unveiled Wednesday, has already been assigned a huge job: reversing the fortunes of the struggling newspaper industry. After announcing the features of the new device, which include a bigger-than-ever screen and a PDF reader, the Seattle company also revealed a partnership with Washington Post Co. and New York Times Co.

WASHINGTON - Disclosure of a highly classified intelligence operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials. The operation received new scrutiny this week after the Justice Department disclosed it had obtained telephone records for calls to and from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press news service and its journalists in April and May 2012 in a high-level investigation of the alleged leak of classified information.

There are two things you can do for your mother on Mother's Day. One is to say "thank you. " (Over lunch, with flowers.) The other is to ask her for advice - even if she's not convinced you really want it. "I don't think kids take any advice from their parents after they're 12," my mother told me last week. "But maybe they'll consider it. If they consider it, that's all you can ask. " Lois Doyle McManus is 87, and arthritis is getting in the way of her piano career. Her most recent performance, a concert with a community college orchestra, was last month.

Nick Souza doesn't remember developing the film of what he considers his most noteworthy front-page photo. He doesn't even recall printing the image. What he does remember is "standing on a giant ladder in the middle of Broadway" to photograph co-workers lined up in front of the old Herald Examiner. "I quickly snapped some photos of the editors, reporters and photographers that ended up being run six columns wide," he said, "with the headline: 'So Long, L.A.'" A generation has come of age since the death of Hearst's Los Angeles Herald Examiner on Nov. 2, 1989, a digital generation that has no memory of The Times' scrappy competitor.

A judge ruled on Thursday that The Times could not be stopped from reporting on testimony from the top manager of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in a deposition for an open-government lawsuit. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Luis A. Lavin said that in asking the court to deny Times reporters access to the testimony and a prohibition against articles about it, the commission sought “essentially a gag order.” “This is a public matter,” Lavin said of the lawsuit brought against the commission by The Times and a 1st Amendment group, Californians Aware.

WASHINGTON - The FBI has found female DNA on at least one of the two homemade bombs detonated during the Boston Marathon on April 15, complicating the task of identifying how and where the deadly devices were constructed. The presence of genetic material does not necessarily mean a woman helped build the pressure-cooker bombs that killed three people and injured more than 260 others, said a law enforcement official, who discussed the discovery on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

People looking for a career may want to avoid some of the worst jobs around -- lumberjack, oil-rig operator and meter reader. Those are among the least promising professions, according to a new analysis. And you almost certainly should steer clear of the worst job on the list - newspaper reporter. Forget swashbuckling or intrepid. Endangered is more like it. Being an ink-stained wretch beat out 190 other careers for the distinction of being named the absolute worst. Being a reporter, according to the analysis, is even less promising than being an actor, which was named the fourth-worst profession.

The possible sale of the Orange County Register's parent company could mark the start of a cost-cutting wave of consolidation of rival newspapers within regional markets. It once was rare for newspapers to team up with nearby competitors, in part because of antitrust concerns. But after several years of aggressively slashing expenses, many publishers see such consolidation as the response to a slide in advertising revenue, which has continued this year despite a firming of the overall U.S. economy, experts say. Although the newspapers would retain their separate identities, acquirers could save millions of dollars by consolidating administrative operations.

A fire broke out at the former Chicago Sun-Times building, which is being demolished to make way for Donald Trump's glitzy 90-story condominium and hotel tower. No serious injuries were reported. The blaze apparently started on the fifth floor after construction workers used torches to cut out pieces of the newspaper building's interior, Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter said.

Al Neuharth, the newspaper mogul who in 1982 made a $1-billion gamble called USA Today that earned derision for its emphasis on brevity, flashy graphics and upbeat stories but endured to become the nation's largest-circulation newspaper, died Friday in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. He died of complications from a recent fall, according to USA Today and the Newseum, the Washington, D.C., news museum he founded. Described by detractors and admirers as brutish, egomaniacal, brilliant and fiercely competitive, Neuharth was a latter-day Citizen Kane, who in the 1970s turned the small Gannett newspaper chain into the nation's most profitable newspaper company.

The longtime campus newspaper at UC Irvine may be forced to cease printing in the next year if students fail to approved a quarterly fee to help sustain the weekly publication. Like newspapers across the country, rising printing costs have forced UCI's weekly New University to cut back, according to the paper's student editor. Once a robust 60-page newspaper, the paper has shrunk to 24 pages in the last six years and editors  have had their compensation chopped in half, now earning between $24 and $50 a week.