As football fever begins to grip Africa and the rest of the world, Google recently launched its Doodle4Google 'I love football' competition. Google doodles are variations on the official Google logo, usually involving a clever manipulation of the letters of the search engine's name. School children between the ages of four and 17 in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa as well as other countries globally are invited to participate with the chance to have one's work featured on the search engine's global home page for the whole of 11 July, the day of the 2010 FIFA World Cup final. National winners will also have his or her design displayed on their respective country's Google home page for a full day during the World Cup. Another global event to be celebrated worldwide is World Press Freedom Day coming up on 3 May. Malawi's journalists have already got the ball rolling with their celebrations separated into three events across Mzuzu, Lilongwe and Blantyre. The first event was held over the weekend in Mzuzu and hosted John Warner, public affairs officer at the US Embassy to Malawi. There is no real freedom in any country without press freedom as the right to access information and to be an informed citizen forms the premise upon which human rights and social development are based. African newspaper execs have been invited by WAN-IFRA, the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and the Norwegian School of Management to participate in a global survey that seeks to better understand and quantify newspaper companies' responses to challenges across the newspaper company value chain. The survey is part of the second annual World Newspaper Future and Change Study and as a way of thanking survey respondents for their contribution, WAN-IFRA plans to send them the final report following the World Newspaper Congress in Beirut in June 2010.

Ciao, Sindy Peters, Africa editor
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