From RSF.org:

A demonstration was held today in Kabul in support of Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, while the senate issued a statement disagreeing with the statement issued yesterday by the senate president supporting Kambakhsh’s death sentence.

The Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark uses a survey from Sacred Heart University to start a conversation about the American public's bias against the press.

Friday will mark the sixth anniversary of the savage beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Islamist extremists in Pakistan.

His father Judea Pearl offers these thoughts on journalism in a Wall Street Journal commentary:

Journalist Sayed Yacoub Ibrahimi writes a first-person story about his brother, Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh, sentenced to death by a court in northern Afghanistan for blasphemy.

From the BBC:

The upper house of the Afghan parliament has supported a death sentence issued against a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan.

The Poynter Institute's Bobbi Bowman on news that doesn't break, per se, but is the story behind the story that is often more significant in the long term rather than splashy in the sort term.

She was quoting legendary editor Eugene L. Roberts, who once said: "Many important stories don’t break. They seep, trickle and ooze. Let’s be sure we are covering the ooze."

Bowman gives a census story out of Illinois as a way to cover the ooze of how the workforce is changing and the implications for the future.

From AP via CTV.ca:

Nigel Eccles, a news junkie and former online betting site employee, wanted to try pursuing both interests at once.

Thus was born Hubdub -- a new website Eccles and three colleagues in Edinburgh, Scotland, assembled -- where customers will bet for fun, not money, on the outcomes of real news stories. ...

Eccles, who has worked on business strategy at Johnston Press PLC, a major regional newspaper publisher in the U.K., said he saw how exciting sports betting could be when he worked at Flutter, a European online betting exchange that was sold to Betfair, an Internet wagering site.

The problem was, he didn't enjoy following sports.

"I do, however, follow technology and politics," Eccles said in a phone interview. "Sometimes I'll read an article and think, 'Hey, that's totally wrong.'"

And he often wondered how news stories about pending events turned out in the end.

From the Jan. 25 NYT:

The Wall Street Journal will continue to charge readers for access to much of its Web site, Rupert Murdoch said Thursday.

For months, Mr. Murdoch, who took control of the paper in December, has vacillated publicly over whether to maintain its subscription firewall. But officials at his company, News Corporation, say that this time, a decision has actually been made to keep it — for now, at least.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Murdoch said that the pages on WSJ.com “giving the greatest insights, that will still be a subscription service,” according to Reuters.

The U.S. seems to be belatedly recognizing that while they were bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, they neglected areas where the terrorists really were operating.

While media outlets have exploded in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001, 2007 proved to be a difficult year for press freedom there.

Then you might wish to check out my CTV.ca feature that was published today: What are the warning signs of a possible recession?

It's a quick overview of some of the quantitative tea leaves that economists monitor.

From AP via CTV.ca:

U.S. newspapers' online audiences grew about six per cent last year, an industry group reported Thursday, a rare bit of good news for an industry struggling to adapt as readers and advertising dollars continue to migrate online.

A Northern Ireland restaurant critic who shat mightily on Belfast's Goodfellas Restaurant and Pizzeria lost a libel lawsuit in a jury trial. The Irish News wants that verdict overturned.

Has a young Afghan journalism student been sentenced to death to intimidate his older brother, also a journalist?

From the Jan. 17 Tyee:

Apology

Mair column contained errors.

By David Beers
Published: January 17, 2008

TheTyee.ca

Regarding Rafe Mair's column published in The Tyee on Dec. 24, 2007.

The Tyee unreservedly retracts the statements as to the treatment of Messrs. Krieger and Murphy by the Province and by the Asper family made in that column. The statements were in error. We apologize unreservedly for making those statements. We sincerely regret any damage or harm that has been suffered by any of the individuals involved, including the Asper family.

I don't expect this next sentence was meant to be funny, but I did find it amusing on a certain level:

We also wish to use this opportunity to rescind any suggestion or recommendation to Tyee and Province readers that they cancel their Province subscriptions and instead spend the money on the Tyee or the Tyee Fellowship Fund.

David Beers is founding editor of The Tyee.

This earlier apology and correction (from Dec. 27;  also written by Beers) puts the matter into better context:

An opinion column by Rafe Mair, published on this site Dec. 24, 2007, stated that political cartoonists Dan Murphy and Bob Krieger were to be "let go" by the The Province newspaper.

In fact, while Murphy and Krieger were told by Province management that their cartoons would no longer be regularly published on the editorial pages of The Province, they were offered other positions at the newspaper as well as the option of leaving the employ of The Province with buy-out payments.

As soon as these facts came to the attention of the editors of The Tyee over the holidays, we corrected the Mair column. The Tyee subsequently removed the column from the site on Wednesday afternoon.

We apologize for any confusion or distress the column may have caused members of The Province's staff, management or readership.

CBC News publisher John Cruickshank explains his rationale for transferring the reporter that he named in a publicly released letter to the Conservative party but won't name in his blog posting.

From the BBC: (thanks, Mungo Says Bah!)

The poem appeared in a Burmese celebrity gossip magazine

The Burmese authorities have arrested a well known poet, who published a love poem with a hidden message criticising the country's military leader.

Poet Saw Wai's work - titled February the Fourteenth - was published in a Rangoon magazine, The Love Journal.

Taken together, the first words of each line read: "General Than Shwe is crazy with power."

Dissidents in Burma have used similar techniques before to get their messages past government censors. ...

Last year an advertisement was placed in one of Burma's main newspapers in the name of a Swedish travel company which contained the hidden message "Killer Than Shwe".

The company did not really exist.