From the BBC:

Relatives of the journalists were present for the judgement

A coroner in Sydney has ruled that five Australian-based journalists, known as the Balibo Five, were deliberately killed in East Timor in 1975.

The deputy coroner of New South Wales, Dorelle Pinch, said there was enough evidence to constitute a war crime.

She said two Australians, two Britons and a New Zealander were killed by Indonesian special forces to stop them exposing the invasion of East Timor.

Official Indonesian reports always said they were killed in crossfire.

For more than three decades, the families of the Balibo Five have sought to correct the historical record and to prove that the newsmen were executed rather than accidentally killed in the heat of battle.

Now, they have finally been vindicated.

Globeandmail.com's Mathew Ingram has a blog posting up today called Taser video is journalism in the raw. It's about the horrible case of a Polish man tasered by RCMP officers in Vancouver International Airport and dying as a result.

Paul Pritchard, a bystander with a digital camera, captured the last moments of Robert Dziekanski's life on video.

... One of the main benefits of a "citizen journalist" video such as Mr. Pritchard's: there is no editing. And despite the attempts by the RCMP to keep the video to themselves -- Mr. Pritchard had to get the court to order the RCMP to return the video to him, as they had promised to do when he provided it -- it is now available for anyone to see and make up their own minds about what happened. Sites such as NowPublic.com (based in Vancouver) provide an easy way for people to make their videos and photos of news events available almost as soon as they occur, and projects such as journalism professor Jay Rosen's OffTheBus (a joint effort with Huffington Post) are an attempt to apply that model to political reporting.

Broadly speaking, the phenomenon of "citizen journalism" isn't that new -- after all, the Rodney King video incident took place almost 15 years ago, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination was arguably one of the first examples -- but it is becoming more and more common, and that will likely continue to reshape the way we look at media, and the way media looks at us.

 I'm glad Pritchard was there to record this tragedy, but I don't think what he did is necessarily citizen journalism. I would prefer to call it citizen witnessing.

Capturing one piece of information about an event is a building block of journalism, but taking a number of those blocks -- some of which may be contradictory -- and assembling them into a coherent, well-told story is where journalism starts.

Addendum

Ingram has a news story online today: Violent death scenes get endless online encore.

The Globe and Mail's editorial board likes the 'responsible journalism' ruling delivered this week in the Ottawa Citizen defamation case.

Conrad Black's sentencing has been put off until Dec. 10.

From the CP story on CTV.ca:

The lawyers said they need more time to prepare objections to pre-sentence reports.