Here's the CTV.ca story for details.

These may well be the most meaningful statistic from a business perspective:

TV stations in Canada pulled in $2.6 billion last year, up from $2.5 billion in 2005. Radio stations, meanwhile, reached $1.4 billion, an increase of $76 million from 2005. ...

Advertisers are following consumers. The report found online advertising hit $1 billion in 2006, close to double the $562 million spent in online ads in 2005.

For US$5 billion, conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch is now the owner of the Wall Street Journal.

Here's the news story.

Here's a snippet of NYT media reporter Richard Siklos's take on what it means:

“There’s a very low probability that there’s a grand plan,” said one person close to Mr. Murdoch.

But based on his history, there is little doubt that Mr. Murdoch will directly aim at luring both readers and advertising away from The New York Times and The Financial Times, The Journal’s closest rivals. His strategy will probably include aggressively undercutting advertising and investing heavily in editorial content — particularly in Washington and international news — absorbing losses at first to win the longer-term war.

At its most ambitious, Mr. Murdoch’s vision for Dow Jones would establish The Journal as the rival to The Times in setting the daily news agenda of the country.

The vision has a business corollary: by broadening The Journal’s influence beyond pure business readers, Mr. Murdoch wants to reposition it as not just the world’s leading financial newspaper, but the world’s leading business journalism source for consumers.

From the BBC:

Iran has sentenced two dissident journalists from its ethnic Kurdish minority for being "enemies of God".

Rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), says Adnan Hassanpour and Hiva Boutimar were sentenced by a court in the eastern city of Marivan.

The two journalists have 20 days to appeal against their sentences, but if their cases are rejected by the Supreme Court the sentence will be carried out.

Iran has executed over 100 people so far in 2007, most of them by hanging.

July 31, 1987 was a Friday. I was a reporter in Fort McMurray, Alta. and I was planning on heading down to Edmonton for the weekend.

Just before I left, I phoned a buddy of mine who worked at CBC to see it he wanted to hook up for a beer. "Can'ttalkrightnowgottagobye," was the uncharacteristically terse response before the phone went dead.

"Wow, that was rude," I thought to myself, wondering what had gotten into him. And with that, I boarded the Red Arrow Express bus for the (relatively) big city.