From AP via CTV.ca:

Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday settled a lawsuit with two Chinese journalists who were jailed after the company provided Chinese authorities with information about their online activities.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The two journalists and a family member sued the Sunnyvale-based company earlier this year after Yahoo HK, Yahoo's wholly owned subsidiary based in Hong Kong, gave Chinese authorities e-mails containing pro-democracy literature. The jailed journalists alleged in the lawsuit that jailers have tortured them and that Yahoo was responsible.

The company has denied any responsibility and maintained it was complying with Chinese law when it turned over the e-mails.

The case has raised questions about whether Internet companies should cooperate with governments that deny freedom of speech and frequently crack down on journalists.

From AP via CTV.ca:

Chinese officials are denying reports they're keeping dossiers on foreign journalists who are planning to cover the Beijing Olympics.

With fewer than nine months until the 2008 Summer Games open, Chinese officials attempted to back away Tuesday from widely published comments that the communist government is assembling a database to monitor foreign reporters.

The Foreign Ministry and the Beijing organizing committee struggled to contain the damage from a front-page story in the state-run China Daily, with officials offering a series of denials 24 hours after the report appeared.

The story raises questions about the country's pledge of increased media freedom, part of a successful campaign in landing the Olympics six years ago. It also suggests China's authoritarian government may have heavy-handed plans for dealing with the 28,000 reporters expected for the Games.

"The report you mentioned is incorrect,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Tuesday. "There is no such database.''

Some related reading.

From AP via CTV.ca:

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said Tuesday he intends to make access to The Wall Street Journal's Web site free, trading subscription fees for anticipated ad revenue.

"We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million (subscribers), having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth," Murdoch said.

News Corp. has signed an agreement to acquire Dow Jones & Co., and the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. A special shareholders meeting is scheduled for Dec. 13 in New York.

Murdoch said he believes that a free model, with increased readership for wsj.com, will attract "large numbers" of big-spending advertisers.

The Web site, one of the few news sites globally to successfully introduce a subscription model, currently has around 1 million subscribers, which generates about $50 million in user fees.

When the NYT dropped the paywall on its website, I had a question: "Et tu, globeandmail.com?"

From an Oct. 30 online q-and-a with Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail:

J.D.M. Stewart, Toronto: Good morning, Ed.

What are your thoughts on opening up the Web content of The Globe and Mail, following the lead of The New York Times, a paper that has done this just recently.

I have already been able to use their articles in teaching American history, so perhaps I am developing future readers of that paper while doing so.

I am sure Globe stories would be used a lot, too, if back-issue content was made available free on the Web. It might create new readers.

Is this under consideration at all?

Evelyn Malowany, Montreal: The Toronto Star and The New York Times are free to me online. Why is your newspaper not free to me online? Thank you.

Edward Greenspon: Good morning to both of you. A timely question, for sure, and one we've been discussing internally over many, many months.

More than 90 per cent of our journalistic material currently is free online. But many of our columnists are behind a pay wall as is most of our archived material.

I don't want to get in front of ourselves here, but I would keep my eyes out on this front if I were you. I suspect you will be pleased.