Paul Tweed likes to re-tell the story of the moment he realised the power of the internet. He was sitting up at home at some ungodly hour, waiting for an apology to be published.

He had, against all odds, squeezed the apology out of the National Inquirer, a US supermarket tabloid magazine so outré that it often seemed to get away with publishing whatever it liked – from alien babies to celebrity tittle-tattle

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