Toronto Star ombudsman Don Sellar offers up three scenarios where you get to play Green Eyeshade Person on a kiddy porn story, managing appearances and the ever-popular "taste."

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Toronto Star media columnist Antonia Zerbisias thinks blogs were the story on her beat for 2004.

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A guy wrote a satirical column recently for the National Review Online on how he'd been blown off by the Washington Post. Trouble is, it never happened.

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This NYT piece explores what Osama bin Laden might be trying to accomplish with the apparent moderation of his language in his audio pronouncements.

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This NYT piece explores how easy it is for people to use the Internet covertly, and how that is freaking out the U.S.'s counter-terrorism gurus -- you know, the ones who can't cope with terrorists communicating in the open.

An amusing story, although I'm a little concerned about where this continued blurring of the lines between humans and their animal companions is leading us. :)

The excerpt:

This is an interesting read about a new holiday fad that first publicly surfaced on Seinfeld! (I used to flatter myself by thinking I had seen it all on that show; this one passed me by).

A NYT magazine article probes the thesis that blogs are transforming the lines between the public and private, and that "off the record" for even the most intimate part of the human experience -- peoples' sex lives -- can't be assumed.

OTOH, could it ever have been assumed? Did gossip start with blogs? :)

BBC correspondent Humphrey Hawksley visits Lancaster, Ohio and finds the battle for America could be one between moderate and extreme Christians -- a mirror image of what's happening in the Islamic world.

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From CTV.ca: An Italian tourist on a flight from Sydney to Vienna caused a security alert when he sent a cell phone message to his wife claiming his plane had been hijacked by terrorists, the Australian government said Sunday.

The public has never accorded the respect to journalists that it does to, say, pharmacists and nurses.

But a study mentioned at the Poynter Institute's website finds that journos show higher-developed moral reasoning skills than ...   more »

The above headline is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a disturbing story about a poll by Cornell University: More than half of Americans would support limiting the civil rights of Muslims.

A post on how the public views the craft of reportage, this time in response to the venerable Jack Cahill. He was saying how he's never had to wipe spit off his face after telling someone he was a journalist (OK, my words, not his). My point was that people like journos. What they don't like is The Media.

Here is an exchange I had on CAJ-L with Ryerson j-prof John Miller, an extension of my earlier post, On timidity and being a team player.

U.S. broadcast journalism legend Bill Moyers says goodbye tonight from his Public TV pulpit. He's going down swinging!

An excerpt from an NYT story:

The NYT's Frank Rich holds forth on the bleatings of the Christian right, how their influence is magnified in TV news, and why some minority Christian views get ignored altogether.

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I became acquainted with Don McGillivray when I served on the CAJ board from 1989 to 1994. On several occasions, I stayed at his home.

He was a gracious, generous host. For someone who cut ...   more »

Frank -- the gossip rag that brought such important new terms as "fartcatcher" to the Canadian lexicon -- has died. I'm glad someone told me. How else would I have known?

From OhmyNews: OhmyNews a 'Marriage of Democracy and Technology'; OMN founder Oh Yeon Ho gives a keynote speech at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

OhmyNews, the South Korean internet newspaper that's a world leader in the citizen-journalism scene, interviews Dan Gillmor, who's leaving his corporate newspaper gig behind to become a citizen journalism entrepreneur.

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This online debate took place between Paul K. McMaster of the First Amendment Center and Harry Kalven Jr, a University of Chicago law professor.

The preamble:

The NYT carried a Reuters story Wednesday on the the image problem of press freedom in the United States, where the First Amendment celebrated its 213th birthday.

An excerpt: (other links inside!)

I went off on a wee bit of a rant tonight on CAJ-L. The trigger was the timidity of the Canadian media.

I'm feeling a little like the apeman in the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey tonight: I made a wiki entry! Woo-hoo!

(Trust me: I do understand that appearing excited about a relatively minor ...   more »

Cruising around the blogosphere tonight, I found a few interesting tidbits about the case of Gary Webb.

For example, did you know he was one of 18 journalists featured in the book Into The Buzzsaw, ...   more »