Web News Declared Eligible for Pulitzer Prizes

Natalie Portman steals top spot from Johnny Depp this year

(NEWSER) - When you want to ogle an actor, the Internet Movie Database is a reasonable destination. So which 10 celebs racked up the most IMDb profile page views in 2011? The top spot now belongs to Natalie Portman , who snagged the crown from Johnny Depp (now No. 3, he's been No. 1 for six out of the last seven years). IMDb's managing editor certainly isn't shocked at the new queen bee: Natalie "won a Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan, was in the news welcoming a son into the world in June, and appeared in three films." Mashable reports on the rest of the top 10:

2. Mila Kunis : another Black Swan star

...and other mistakes

(NEWSER) - One is the president of the United States. The other was bent on destroying the United States. So you’d think Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden would be pretty easy to keep straight. But when the former announced the death of the latter, a really embarrassing number of news outlets couldn’t , and the ubiquitous "Obama bin Laden dead" gaffes that followed have been named Poynter ’s top typo of the year. Every year Craig Silverman looks at the biggest media screw-ups; the other notable typos, errors, and gaffes he spotted include: More»

Woman ordered to pay $2.5M for online defamation

(NEWSER) - In what could end up being very bad news for outspoken bloggers across America, a federal judge has decided that a blogger was not acting as a journalist when she accused an Oregon lawyer of acting unethically and illegally as a trustee in a bankruptcy hearing. The judge denied Crystal Cox's request for legal protections customarily offered to journalists, and a jury subsequently ordered her to pay $2.5 million for defaming lawyer Kevin Padrick and his company. More»

'Red Social' launches a year after Cuban Wikipedia clone

(NEWSER) - Cuba has introduced its very own Facebook-style social network called Red Social. The website appears to be sponsored by the communist nation's Ministry of Education, reports USA Today . Red Social imitates both the look and feel of Facebook, and its homepage features the slogan "A virtual meeting point for Cuban universities." The new social network arrives a year after Cuba launched its own Wikipedia, EcuRed, but it is only available from within the country. The domain name is facebook.ismm.edu.cu. More»

Harrisburg Patriot-News' months-long coverage largely ignored

(NEWSER) - The nation—not to mention State College, Pa.—was rocked by the Penn State sex abuse allegations, which were first reported on November 5. Except that's not when they were first reported. The Harrisburg Patriot-News covered the initial allegations to surface against Jerry Sandusky ... in March. That's eight months before he was arrested, and eight months before the nation took notice. The Los Angeles Times reports on the local paper's coverage—and dismay with the utter lack of reaction. More»