From a February 2008 interview with Steve Duenes, graphics director for The New York Times:

From: Nicholas Kristof
Subject: the power of art

in september i traveled with bill gates to africa to look at his work fighting aids there. while setting the trip up, it emerged that his initial interest in giving pots of money to fight disease had arisen after he and melinda read a two-part series of articles i did on third world disease in January 1997. until then, their plan had been to give money mainly to get countries wired and full of computers.

bill and melinda recently reread those pieces, and said that it was the second piece in the series, about bad water and diarrhea killing millions of kids a year, that really got them thinking of public health. Great! I was really proud of this impact that my worldwide reporting and 3,500-word article had had. But then bill confessed that actually it wasn't the article itself that had grabbed him so much -- it was the graphic. It was just a two column, inside graphic, very simple, listing third world health problems and how many people they kill. but he remembered it after all those years and said that it was the single thing that got him redirected toward public health.

No graphic in human history has saved so many lives in africa and asia.

A little over the top, but it’s a nice story. Though while Mr. Kristof celebrates, this seems as much an indictment of NY Times coverage of rural poverty. (via)

Updated April 28, 2008: I dug up the graphic in question, posted it here, and added a link in the text above.

I’ve heard of candidates keeping blogs, but I think this is a first. From the Hindustan Times:

“Malaysia’s political landscape was hit hard from cyberspace last week when a blogger entered Parliament after winning in elections that saw the ruling coalition lose its two-thirds majority in the House. In a country where the mainstream media largely supported the government, Jeff Ooi — a former advertising copywriter — used his political blog to win a seat on an Opposition ticket. He was not the only blogger in the fray.

Elizabeth Wong, a social activist and blogger, won a state assembly election....

Technology destroyed the powerful hold that Abdullah’s Barisan Nasional had over Malaysia, where sex scandals and videos of ministers frolicking with their girlfriends have been posted on YouTube, much to their embarrassment.”