for anyone thats interested:-
Within an hour or so after the Conrad Black verdict came down Friday, the Los Angeles Times played the news high up on its Web site -- right below a Paris Hilton story. On the Washington Post's site, the Black decision didn't even rate an easy-to-find headline.
Meanwhile, Canada's leading media sites were brimming with Black. Maclean's, the nation's leading news magazine sported a big "GUILTY" headline next to a dour photo of Black, and offered a smorgasbord of content, including feeds from two bloggers live at the courthouse in Chicago.
Outside of Chicago, where Black is big local story, and perhaps New York, this country's media center, the Black verdict is just another headline, a story destined for the business section. But in Canada and the United Kingdom – particularly the former – the Black verdict is boffo, stop-the-presses stuff.
In Canada, he built what would become the world's third-largest English-language newspaper empire, as well as a reputation for both erudition and bombast. When the Canadian government refused to let him accept a British lordship, he renounced his citizenship, a stinging rebuke to some of his countryman.
Whether he's liked or loathed, "Black has been a larger-than-life personality in Canada for quite awhile," said Christopher Waddell, a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.
It's been the same in the United Kingdom, where Black once owned the Daily Telegraph, one of the country's larger newspapers.
Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, and his wife Barbara Amiel are members of the celebrity A-list in Britain, along with Becks and Posh, the Royal family and the ghost of Princess Diana. Black's downfall, a tale of power, greed and private jets to Bora Bora, is what London's tabloid's live for.
In this country, Black has been for the most part another foreign businessman. And it was his business' ownership of the Sun-Times that helped ultimately lead to his trial here on fraud and racketeering charges. It's been a media circus since it started in March, but the bulk of the 300-plus journalists covering it are from outside this country. Indeed in Canada, it's been dubbed "the trial of the century."
In the courtroom Friday, Canadian bloggers typed furiously. On a Maclean's blog dubbed "Black Friday," the posts came minute by minute as the verdicts were read. Down in the courthouse lobby, Canadian TV reporters did live feeds while they waited to get a shot of the press baron leaving the building.
Chris Selley, in article posted on the Maclean's Web site Friday morning, summed up the reasoning behind the mob. "Black does strange things to people, journalists included,'' he wrote. "Some advocated passionately for his acquittal. Some oozed almost deranged contempt."
That black-and-white view of Black was on display, too, Friday among readers of the Toronto Star's Web site. There was this: "The rich and the powerful need to know they are not immune from punishment for committing crimes," wrote Henrietta Penny. "A classic case of greed."
And there was this: "We are truly losing a great Canadian icon," wrote Michael Weir. "I hope that his appeal will not bankrupt him and that justice for Conrad Black finally prevails."
The British press, too, Friday featured a bounty of Black.
"It looked for 11 days as if, against all the odds, Conrad Black would get away with his financial crimes," journalism professor and former editor Roy Greenslade wrote in his blog for The Guardian, a major British paper. He was referring to 11 days of jury deliberation. "But the jury has finally found the swaggering, blustering media mogul guilty of multiple charges of fraud and a single count of obstruction of justice. It's hard to know what took the jurors so long."

Still, Greenslade said he couldn't "gloat much" over the verdict. "Black, for all his many bad points, was not the worst of newspaper owners. Many of the editors who worked closely with him and who I respect...have found much to praise about him in the past. That does not excuse his crimes, far from it."

The Daily Telegraph, the London paper Black once owned, was quick to point the finger at his wife, Amiel, dubbing her the "ultimate hardnosed gold-digger." Amiel once wrote a serious but much derided public affairs column for the paper.

"Having lived a privileged but relatively unostentatious existence," the Telegraph said, [Black] suddenly became involved with a woman whose extravagance -- as she famously admitted herself -- "knew no bounds.""

mhughlett@tribune.com thundley@tribune.com