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“We’re looking at this as a portal to being discovered,” said Anna Madrid, the company’s vice president of business development. “That’s the biggest excitement and draw. We’re gonna bridge the gap.”

It’s a 10- by 10-foot recording booth with an overhead mike and green-screen technology to make it look like you’re singing or dancing or turntable scratching on a moving train, against a well-tagged wall or on a beach at sunset. Each booth offers 1,200 virtual backdrops in high definition.

Sydney Sprague, 16, of Scottsdale, whose songs have been compared with Feist and Ingrid Michaelson, has four videos posted on her profile page at MyStudio.net. All four were cut live in the booth, one with banjo and three with acoustic guitar. She has also done some Panic at the Disco karaoke with her friends for a laugh.

“And major labels really like them because it’s just really good-quality audio, but it gives them a good idea of what you actually sound like live, as opposed to a recording, which can be messed with so that they don’t really know if you sound like that.”

Studio One expects to launch MyStudio in 50 markets in the next 12 months, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Miami.

“That is a huge draw,” Madrid says, “for anyone casting reality television. They can’t be in all 50 states, and their feeling is ‘Our shows are only as good as the people we’re able to cast.’ With this technology, we can take Hollywood to mainstream America.”

The Wall Street meltdown just dealt a big financial blow to Oakland - a Southern California development firm is suspending its long-anticipated plan for a major housing and retail project at the former Oak Knoll Naval Hospital.

But late last week, SunCal notified the city’s Redevelopment Agency that it was suspending work after one of the project’s chief investors, Lehman Bros., declared bankruptcy.

SunCal spokesman Joe Aguirre said in a statement that the company was “unable to obtain assurances of continued funding that would allow us to move forward with confidence.” As a result, he said, the firm could no longer guarantee it would be able to pay a number of consultants and contractors working on the job.

City Councilman Larry Reid, whose district encompasses Oak Knoll, said he still hopes the project can be salvaged. In the meantime, city officials will be sitting down with SunCal to make sure the company provides security and maintenance to prevent the property from becoming a magnet for vandals.

It is difficult to talk about a special identity of Arab environmental media in the same way as one may talk, for example, about an identity relevant to Arab political, cultural, economic, or sports media. An information identity requires some fundamental conditions to be considered autonomous and genuine. One such condition is the existence of professional patterns concerning varieties of news collection, presentation and analysis based on a particular theoretical framework pertaining to environmental issues.

Another condition is the existence of a nucleus of media professionals who are well-trained and dedicated to the environment, and capable of influencing public orientations. A further condition has to do with continuity as contrasted to sparse news and irregular comments. Indeed, all these conditions are absent in the case of most Arab media when they deal with environmental topics. The problem of Arab environmental information may be related to a larger problem concerning Arab science journalism, which is still marginal in Arab media.

Although the occurrence of the term “environment” and its derivatives has increased thousands of times in Arab media during the last decade, the tackling of environmental issues has, in most cases, been limited to mere news and instantaneous reactions to world events, mainly catastrophes. Major international conferences on environment and development, since the Earth Summit in 1992 with the participation of Arab countries in it and their signing of almost all the ensuing treaties of international character, have contributed to motivating the Arab media to discuss environmental issues at length.

However, this interest has been mostly exhibited in quoting bits and pieces of news exactly as transmitted by foreign news agencies. It is observed that most Arab media are satisfied in conveying addresses, often too general in character, of government officials during the opening of conferences and meetings on the environment, while they neglect what is offered by experts, which, alas, is at the heart of the matter.

A study concerning media coverage of environmental issues in Bahrain found that, despite the appearance in the six dailies of the country during 2004 of over 2000 articles on local environment issues, most of them constituted mere news and interviews, while only 4 percent were reports, news analyses and comments.

The rich media professionals from Los Angeles, offers a free website overhaul for lucky web visitors who subscribed to their free monthly tips on effective websites at www.somnicreative.com. One (1) winner is drawn from the web database, on the first week of every month.

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The news arrived at a precarious time for the newspapers — around 2 a.m. Even the night editors had left, forcing a skeleton crew to decide whether to rush something into the paper, or risk being scooped. Two papers took the bait on what soon was exposed as a hoax.

But the news also came at a precarious time for the country: a conscription would have meant the Union army was in trouble, and the price of gold soon shot up. Two journalists from Brooklyn hatched the plan, knowing how best to sneak bogus news into print, and remembering to buy gold beforehand.

Markets exist to convert good information into profitable investments. And, in their deep agnosticism, they also exist to allow false information to create quick profits. During that brief window, false information may in fact be easier to exploit it shows up just in time, and purports to answer the questions on everyone’s mind.

In recent days there has been a range of false reports that managed to gain great purchase across the globe while the truth is still logging on.

Early in the month, Apple stock fell as much as 5 percent after a CNN-sponsored citizen-journalism site, ireport.com, published a false item from a user reporting that Steve Jobs, the company’s chief executive whose health has been a public preoccupation, had been rushed to the emergency room. The poster is still a mystery, though the Securities and Exchange Committee is investigating and CNN is cooperating.

In September, United Airlines lost more than $1 billion in market capitalization when traders treated a six-year-old announcement of a bankruptcy as a new development.

And in politics, it is common for rumors to be floated on sites like Drudge Report, forcing hurried denials and gaining life in the court of public opinion.

With its oodles of information, the Internet is laden with falsehoods, but, in fact, these recent cases show how critical are amplifying sites like Drudge or Google News or Digg to getting reports from the backwoods before the public.