Media

More black and white than colour for Ireland

Occasionally when working in the sports entertainment industry, you find yourself rolling towards an overwhelming question. Will Buckley has been a sports writer for over 15 years; readers of the Guardian and Observer will be familiar with his work. It's even possible a much wider group of people got to hear about his debut novel, written, we're told, without irony in a "semi-autobiographical" manner. Called The Man Who Hated Football, it was released last year to a sniffy enough response from the sporting press.

Noam Chomsky is giving this year's Amnesty International annual lecture on 'The War on Terror'. Amnesty has imposed restrictions on media access to him during his stay

Blundering magicians, naughty bloopers and Gaybo escaping retirement. Dermot Bolger looks at some dubious New Year telly highlights

'Your next musical choice is, 'How Much is that Doggie in the Window?'" says Myles Dungan in disbelief. "It's not one that I necessarily thought that anybody would choose." Particularly not when that person is allegedly "the most cunning, the most devious of them all", according to former Taoiseach Charles Haughey.

The term "silly season" was coined for summertime, but really seasons don't get any sillier in the Irish media than the Christmas and New Year period. Last time around it was dominated by the grim pseudo-journalism of the ascending tsunami death-count. This time there was almost literally nothing, and it seems our papers have got worse at disguising their boredom.

Jerusha McCormack reports from China one the news industry there

Marionette of the sporting gods, new years' lists and cliché, please fill our boots as follows over the next 12 months:

The new year got off to the most tragic start for the family of a young Dublin man. Martin McLoughlin was just 21 and had been celebrating with friends when he was stabbed to death in Jury's new Croke Park Hotel in the early hours of 2006. After a record number of murders in 2005, he is the first casualty of this new year.

Now the new year reviving old desires, the thoughtful soul to solitude retires... but alas for our politicians they must now get stuck in to a gruelling final run-in to next year's general election.