The Wall Street Journal returns home

Editors and reporters who had been scattered in offices from South Brunswick, New Jersey to midtown Manhattan and Soho after September 11 started returning to the World Financial Centre on July 29.

“Downtown will always be our home,” said Steve Goldstein, vice president at Dow Jones, the Journal’s parent company. “It was our headquarters prior to September 11 and it will again be our headquarters.”

Goldstein said the offices have been refinished, refurnished and repeatedly cleaned.

The offices were damaged in the terrorist attacks on the neighbouring World Trade Centre.

About 70 staffers returned July 29 in the first phase of the move; a total of 400 people will return by August 26.

Ann Landers’ final column runs in US newspapers

CHICAGO (AP) — Newspapers throughout the United States published advice columnist Ann Landers’ posthumous finale July 27 — a reprint of a poem defining a successful person as one “whose life was an inspiration, whose memory a benediction.”

Landers, whose real name was Esther “Eppie” Lederer, died of multiple myeloma last month at age 83. She began writing the column in 1955, beating out 30 other candidates to replace Ruth Crowley, the first writer of the Ann Landers column.

Lederer’s final column, carried in about 1,200 newspapers, also listed a reader’s set of “Airline Etiquette” rules and included an anecdote from a reader describing how children who misunderstand prayers or songs sometimes substitute their own words.

Her daughter, Margo Howard, said the column will be ending because that is what her mother wanted.

The column will be replaced by one written by Lederer’s two close associates, Kathy Mitchell and Marcy Sugar. Creators Syndicate, which distributed the Ann Landers column, has signed about 800 newspapers to the Landers spinoff, called “Annie’s Mailbox.”

Lederer’s twin sister, Pauline Phillips, also known as Abigail Van Buren, followed her into the profession as writer of the Dear Abby column.

Phillips’ daughter, Jeanne Phillips, has contributed to the syndicated column since the early 1980s and took over most of the duties in the early 1990s. The column appears in more than 1,200 newspapers around the globe, according to Universal Press Syndicate.

Paper apologises

for ‘crude’ headline

TRENTON, New Jersey (AP) — The publisher of The Trentonian apologised in print for a headline about a fire at a mental hospital, saying it was “crude” and “inaccurate”.

The July 9 fire damaged an administration building at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. No patients were in the building and no one was injured.

The tabloid’s story appeared under the headline “Roasted Nuts”.

In a signed editorial published July 23, David B Bonfield called it a “crude, thoughtless headline that cruelly made light of mental illness. In the bargain, it was inaccurate.”

Bonfield noted that readers of the 46,000-circulation daily had flooded the publication with complaints.

“This newspaper has always prided itself in standing up for the powerless against the powerful — a style that won it a Pulitzer Prize in some fisticuffs over New Jersey political corruption. It should have come as no surprise to us, then, when our readers stood up for the powerless — against us — and let us have it. And we had it coming. Every blow,” Bonfield wrote.

Italy’s president sends message to parliament on free media

ROME (AP) — Amid concern over Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s influence on Italian media, parliament began debating ways to ensure free and varied expression after the nation’s president made a rare plea to lawmakers to act on the matter.

Berlusconi, Italy’s richest man, owns a vast media empire — including TV channels, newspapers, magazines, advertising and film companies. As premier, he has indirect influence on state television and has resisted calls to surrender his private positions.

The largely ceremonial President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, using a power last invoked six years ago by a predecessor, sent a seven-page letter July 23 asserting: “There is no democracy without pluralism and impartiality of information: I trust that parliament will know how to act toward the full realisation of this principle.”

Parliament took up the matter July 27, but although all sides had enthusiastically greeted Ciampi’s letter, few turned up for the debate.

The letter calls for the guarantee of free-speech principles but is careful not to target specific politicians. Ciampi’s office has refused to explain what led the president to send the letter, or what he hoped to achieve.