Publishers, being straightforward capitalists, have a duty to maximise their profits, and one way to do this is to pay writers less or pay fewer writers. To them, the blogosphere is starting to look like a huge open-cast mine of free copy, and the fact that it’s neither researched nor necessarily true is beside the point: that just means they can fire the research department too…

Lacking any quality control mechanism, blogs easily sink into a Hobbesian state of nature – rule by the loudest and the nastiest.

A police operation launched following reports that a lion was loose in north Belfast has been called off after the animal turned out to be a stray dog.