From CBC.ca:

The CBC announced on Thursday plans to integrate its English-language services under one executive, its current English television vice-president, Richard Stursberg.

The public broadcaster's board of directors have approved a proposal by CBC president Robert Rabinovitch to integrate the English-language side of the CBC.

Stursberg will assume the newly created role of executive vice-president, English services.

Each of CBC's media streams -- online, television and radio -- will continue to move forward on their specific paths and "there is no plan whatsoever for any reduction in staff," Stursberg told CBCNews.ca Arts.

"What this is about is actually finding ways of taking the content … and making sure that it is more broadly available across all platforms as they develop."

Addendum

Here's today's Globe and Mail story.

The Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark on whether smartening up, wa-a-a-y up, will be the way forward for tomorrow's newspapers.

Dan Henry, CBC's senior legal counsel, has blogged about the Cusson v. Ottawa Citizen et al decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Justice Sharpe said he was steering a middle course between the restrictive traditional Canadian common law of defamation and the alternative U.S. approach.

In the U.S., if a media organization publishes information about a public official or public figure, it can succeed in its defence even if the information turns out to be defamatory and untrue, unless the person suing proves that the journalists proceeded with “actual malice”: i.e. they knew, or ought to have known, that what they were publishing was false. There is no requirement there to have been “responsible” or “fair”, in the eyes of a judge or jury.

Under our new defence, if a media organization publishes information on any matter of public interest, it can succeed even if the information turns out to be defamatory and untrue, if it can convince the court, on a balance of probabilities, that the steps it took in gathering and publishing were “responsible and fair.”

On a trip to Russia in 1989, I was on my way to a Russian journalist's office in downtown Moscow for a chat.

I was using Moscow's subway to get there. At some point, I became lost. Totally, completely and utterly lost.

The subway map, was, unhelpfully, in Cyrillic text (damn those Russians).

I didn't know where I was, where I was going, or how to get back to where I started.

Standing in front of the map on the subway car and frustrated as hell, I blurted out a "FUCK!!" and gave the map one hard shot with the bottom of my clenched left hand.

This had the phlegmatic Muscovites on the car looking at me out of the corner of their eyes.

One man approached me. "Vat is problem?" he asked warily, in Russian-accented English.

I told him. He showed me where I was, where I had to go for my appointment and how to get there.

Problem solved, stress evaporated, tantrum gone! :)

As a police reporter in Fort McMurray, Alta. in the late 1980s, I got to know the local constabulatory reasonably well. One cop in particular struck me as a decent guy in low-stress situations, but this sentence from him summed up his problem in high-stress ones: "It's a war out there, and you can't lose."

This guy laid a disproportionate number of charges such as obstruction or assaulting a police officer when compared to his peers. I suspect his them-or-me attitude made his job more difficult than it had to be.

While most police officers are decent people doing an exceedingly difficult job, and there are mercifully few genuine creeps in the mix, I think a big part of the problem when conflicts erupt are the scaredy-cat cops.

From the BBC:

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have defended a judicial sentence of 200 lashes for a rape victim.

The justice ministry said in a statement that the sentence was justified because the woman was in a car with an unrelated man. ...

The 19-year-old, who has not been named, was travelling in a car with a male friend last year, when the car was attacked by a gang of seven men who raped both of them.

She has become known as the "Qatif girl", a reference to the largely Shia town which she comes from.

Qatif Girl has also been sentenced to six months in prison. The court banned her lawyer from the courtroom. The lawyer's licence has been taken away.

This Arab News story has some additional detail.

Some notes on lashing from a Nov. 16 International Herald Tribune story:

The woman remains free for the time being and has not yet been lashed.

Lashing is a common sentence under the Saudi penal code, applied for crimes ranging from homosexuality and drinking alcohol to theft and adultery. Usually, lashes are meted out in increments because offenders could not survive hundreds of lashes at once. The administrator of the punishment is supposed to hold a Koran under his arm so he cannot swing the whip too fiercely; lashes are not supposed to leave permanent scars. The sentence is frequently delivered in public, often at the entrance to a jail.

From The Globe and Mail:

One of Pakistan's most popular political TV chat shows, Capital Talk, had an impressive collection of panelists for yesterday's show, including a retired general and a senator.

Hamid Mir, a leading Pakistani journalist and the program's host, orchestrated a lively debate, engaging the audience with his usual skill. The familiar theme music introduced and ended the program, which focused on the most popular topic in the country: the emergency measures and the January election.

But the program was not filmed yesterday as usual in the studios of the popular Geo television channel. There was no point. Geo has been pulled off the air. Instead, the show was set up on the pavement outside the studio building. Instead of playing to millions of viewers, Capital Talk was seen by only the few dozen who gathered on the street to watch and a small number tuning in via the Internet.

"We want to tell [General Pervez] Musharraf that he has failed to silence our voice," said Mr. Mir, who does not dare to sleep in his own bed at night for fear that police will arrest him.