Take this example from TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher:

An unconfirmed rumour has reached me via a reliable source that LinkedIn is in talks with media giant News Corporation over a possible buyout in January 2008. The reason I am running with this, is that the source is very well-placed. Furthermore, the rumour has the fundamental ring of truth about it.

Internet marketer Dan Greenburg on the the hard work behind making online videos a "spontaneous" mass success.

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.

Islamists? Islamofascists? Terrorists? Violent jihadists?

Timothy Garton Ash said the label matters when we are trying to talk about those Muslims who are trying to cause real harm to Western society without creating new enemies by alienating moderate Muslims.

The Washington Post came under fire for allegedly breaking the embargo of a report by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS that reduced the estimated size of the global HIV epidemic.

Slate media critic Jack Schafer says bully for the Post:*

Blogger Brent Lamb has this view of the Reddits and Diggs of this world:

Social media sites have proved that there's no substitute for a good editor or blogger. When you have a crowd voting posts up and down, anything truly original or relevant gets filtered out. On reddit, crap such as endless posts about Ron Paul, fringe conspiracy posts sourced from sites with racist connections and other dodgy stuff constantly rises to the top.

And repeat posts. Every two or three months, one of 5-10 common links rises to the top -- again -- as someone discovers it again for the first time and describes it as "THE MOST AMAZING IMAGE YOU HAVE EVER SEEN, EVAR, REALLY." And then it turns out it's that scrolling photoshop of space you've seen twenty times already. Or a picture of "bigfoot" that's very clearly a bear.

While the number of distraction on the internets grow and evolve, a damn good blog is still a good thing when you find one.

From the BBC:

Bilal Hussein was part of an AP team which won the Pulitzer prize

The US military says it will recommend criminal charges against an Associated Press photographer detained in 2006 on suspicion of helping Iraqi insurgents.

The Pentagon says additional evidence has come to light proving Bilal Hussein is a "terrorist media operative" who infiltrated the news agency.

The case will be passed to Iraqi judges who will decide if he should be tried.

AP says its own investigation has found no evidence that he was anything but an Iraqi journalist working in a war zone.

The agency's lawyers say they have been denied access to Mr Hussein and the evidence against him, making it impossible to build a defence.

There's a new leadership in the defence department, but the same callous disregard from justice Tom Curley AP President

AP's president and chief executive officer Tom Curley told the BBC he believed the US military simply wished to keep Mr Hussein in jail as long as possible.

He said the US did not want news coming out of Anbar province, which he called an "information black hole".

From the BBC:

A journalist recovers after the confrontation with police

More than 100 journalists protesting against media restrictions and emergency rule have been arrested in Pakistan, eyewitnesses say.

Most were held in Karachi and several detained in Hyderabad.

Police baton-charged the Karachi journalists after they tried to stage a protest march. Some of them were hurt.

When President Pervez Musharraf imposed emergency rule on 3 November, radio and TV news was banned, as was criticism of the government.

On Monday, Democracy Now! spoke with Mazhar Abbas, a Pakistani TV journalist and secretary-general of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists.

From the BBC:

Consumer demand for bandwidth could see the internet running out of capacity as early as 2010, a new study warns.

US analyst firm Nemertes Research predicted a drastic slowdown as the network struggles to cope with the amount of data being carried on it.

Such gridlock would drastically affect how people use the web and could mean the next Google or YouTube simply doesn't get off the ground, it said.

The report said billions needed to be spent upgrading broadband networks.

It put the figure at around $137bn (£66bn) globally.

For users, the slowdown could see a return to the bad old days of dial-up, the report predicts.

The Associated Press had to retract a story from an India-based stringer that had Paris Hilton reportedly blathering about the need for action on drunken elephants in rural northern India. The chain of sourcing on the quote is something to behold.

On May 18, 1966, a real bomb detonated inside Parliament Hill's Centre Block, killing the man who wanted to detonate it in the House of Commons.

Six months later, five Carleton University students -- Mike Steinberg, Al Kaufman, David Balcon,Victor Nerenberg and John Hanlon -- decided to test Parliament Hill's security by trying to smuggle tape recorders into the Commons' public galleries. They succeeded and managed to make an unauthorized audio recording. In the process, they found out that Hansard is somewhat sanitized.

Veteran radio journalist Hanlon -- formerly with CBC in Alberta; now with NHK in Japan -- recalls the story and reaction in this Oct. 20 Ottawa Citizen story:

Blog reader John Hanlon reminded me of this graf from a BBC story about Spanish cartoonists getting spanked for making fun of a royal there:

In Romania, a law has just been passed which exposes journalists to the risk of seven years in jail if they publish video footage taken secretly of politicians taking bribes. It follows a case in which film of a government minister accepting a secret cash payment was shown on TV, leading to his resignation.

Here's some other stuff that I didn't highlight the first time, but is worth noting:

In France, a newspaper expose written during this year's presidential election campaign, revealing that Cecilia Sarkozy - the then wife of winning candidate Nicolas Sarkozy - failed to cast her vote, was removed on orders from the newspaper's owner, a close associate of the new President.

In Turkey, the infamous Article 301 of the criminal code makes it an offence punishable by jail terms to insult the armed forces or those in positions of high office.

Criminal prosecutions

Turkish officials insist that similar laws protecting the holders of high offices of state also exist in France and other Western countries.

But a Turkish legal expert explained the difference: "It's like the laws in some American states that still ban oral sex between married couples", he said. "They exist on paper but are no longer used!"

The economic rise of Asia has been fueled in part by a 19th Century approach to industrialization, with coal-fired power plants going up almost weekly in China. This has pushed China into position to pass the United States as the world's biggest total emitter of greenhouse gases.

However, climate change may well strip Asia of any economic gains it makes, claims a new report.

From the BBC:

The leader of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge was a patriot who staunchly defended social justice, the regime's former head of state has said (about Pol Pot).

In a new book, Khieu Samphan says there was never a policy to starve people and no order to carry out mass killings.

Prosecutors are studying the book to determine what defence Khieu Samphan may take if he is ever charged.

Some estimates say up to 2.5 million people died during the Khmer Rouge reign from 1975 to 1979.

Khieu Samphan is one of the few surviving senior figures of the regime.

Four of his colleagues have been charged by a UN-backed genocide tribunal and Khieu Samphan, 76, is expected to be added.

Then I guess the people behind this are either horribly mistaken or deliberately lying their faces off.

Update

On Nov. 19, Cambodian police arrested Khieu Samphan and charged him with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Here's a BBC backgrounder on the Khmer Rouge. Here's another on some key KR figures.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders have earned themselves a trip to The Big Smoke to play in the Grey Cup next Sunday, knocking off the B.C. Lions at B.C. Place in Vancouver by a 26-17 margin.

This was not an outcome I predicted. That's not a knock on the 'Riders, who are a beat-up club these days.

But they weren't the team that coughed up the football five times. And while they won ugly, the 'Riders were the better team today and deserve the title of Western conference champions.

The 'Riders will face the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, who toppled the hometown Toronto Argonauts in the Eastern conference championship 19-10.

You know, the 'Riders won their last championship in 1989 in (wait for it) ... Toronto!

Addendum

By the time I got back downtown, it was pushing 6 p.m. When I got to my subway stop, I popped into a nearby watering hole to catch up on the game.

Any TV set that had football on it was tuned to some anonymous NFL game.

I suspect that almost any other bar I went to would have similarly ignored a Western conference CFL final.

People in this town largely don't give a shit about the CFL. It's too bad the Grey Cup is being played here.

From the BBC:

A UN panel has agreed a landmark report on climate change, and says the world must act hastily to prevent the worst predicted effects coming to pass.

After arduous talks in Valencia, Spain, scientists agreed a document they hope will shape debate on the next phase of the fight against climate change. ...

The text will be officially launched by UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Saturday.

Delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarised thousands of pages of scientific analysis, bringing together elements of the three reports already released this year, on the science of climate change, impacts and adaptation, and options for mitigating the problem. ...

Among the report's top-line conclusions are that climate change is "unequivocal", that humankind's emissions of greenhouse gases are more than 90% likely to be the main cause, and that impacts can be reduced at reasonable cost.

The synthesis summary finalised late on Friday strengthens the language of those earlier reports with a warning that climate change may bring "abrupt and irreversible" impacts.

Such impacts could include the fast melting of glaciers and species extinctions.

Here's the NYT story.

The Web is becoming an ever more commercially-viable outlet for video. Webisodes are catching on, and marketers are finding out how to make it work for them.

The Globe and Mail's Rod Mickleburgh examines whether the video of the tragic death of Robert Dziekanski at the hands of Taser-wielding RCMP officers tells the whole story.

I offer a few thoughts on the Rodney King footage of the early 1990s, and what lessons can be drawn from that case.

Tear down the wall! online publishers seem to be crying these days. This Washington Post story rounds up what's been happening.

This NYT article reports that despite the jailing of lawyers and human rights activists under President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's declaration of emergency rule, the Islamist militants in the outer regions of Pakistan are making territorial gains.

From the NYT:

CBS filed a motion yesterday seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit by Dan Rather, who says that the network violated his contract by giving him too little to do after it forced him off the evening news in 2005 and that its investigation of the news segment about President Bush’s National Guard service was politically biased.

“This lawsuit is a regrettable attempt by plaintiff Dan Rather to remain in the public eye, and to settle old scores and perceived slights, based on an array of far-fetched allegations,” the network said in a 30-page brief filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The papers represented the network’s first response to the suit Mr. Rather filed on Sept. 19.

Referring specifically to Mr. Rather’s assertion that CBS and its senior executives had sought to do the White House’s bidding in commissioning an incomplete investigation of the National Guard segment, the network said: “CBS and its executives are not now, and never have been, out to get Dan Rather.”