From AP via TheStar.com:

Two journalists have been jailed for seven years each on charges of undermining (Burma's)  military junta after they were caught with a U.N. human rights report.

The Politico may have lots of fine journalists who know a lot about Beltway stuff, but at least one of their reporters -- and presumably, the editors above them -- don't know shit about the climate crisis. CJR's Curtis Brainard explains.

Offshoring evangelist and online publisher James Macpherson says American newspaper publishers need to follow his lead and start shipping jobs to India.

Mumbai: People witnessed. They Twittered. They Flickr'd. Observers of the violence and chaos in Mumbai were Twittering so much that there was a Mumbai tweet about once per second.

Rem Reider of American Journalism Review has noted that Citizen Kane has gotten better press than Beverly Hills Chihuahua. There's a reason for that too.

Last week, a Toronto Star cartoon had a sign up saying "Cheap Crappy Toys" above what appeared to be some "Tickle Me Elmo" dolls.

"Made in China?" asked a woman. "Worse. Made in Detroit," responded a man (see it here).

That got the ire of some in the automotive sector.

From The Globe and Mail:

The Ontario Court of Appeal yesterday overturned a libel conviction against the Toronto Star in connection with an investigative article that explored a dispute between a developer and neighbourhood activists in Ontario's cottage country.

The court ordered a new trial, citing a succession of errors the trial judge made while instructing a jury. The mistakes included an erroneous explanation of a new defence - "responsible journalism" - which a newspaper can employ when it publishes an allegedly defamatory article on a matter of public interest.

A jury had awarded Peter Grant $400,000 in general damages, $25,000 in aggravated damages and $1-million in punitive damages.

Former business reporter turned academic Chris Roush argues the U.S. business media did try to get the public's attention about building problems in the financial system. But no one listened.

A very arresting photograph:

You can read the Guardian story about it here.

To a certain extent, that headline is gallows humour, but columnist Richard Siklos sums up some of the bad news coming out of the United States for media companies operating there.

From The Globe and Mail:

Vancouver Police want to interview Globe and Mail columnist Gary Mason in their investigation of the leak of confidential information about city council's decision to approve a $100-million loan to developers of the 2010 Olympic Village.

But Mr. Mason is declining the request, leaving police uncertain about how to proceed with a probe currently aimed at determining whether a criminal offence has been committed.

The Globe and Mail broke the story of the approval of the loan during an in-camera council meeting last month. The agreement became a major issue in this month's municipal election that saw Peter Ladner, the mayoral candidate of the majority Non-Partisan Association, defeated, and the NPA reduced to a single seat on Vancouver City Council.

John Cruickshank has left his position as CBC News' publisher to take the helm of the Toronto Star as, er, publisher.

His tenure at the public broadcaster will have lasted a whopping 14 months.

The Times of India's home page at 10 p.m. ET:

From AP via Google News:

Two foreign journalists were kidnapped in northern Somalia on Wednesday while doing a story on the rampant piracy in the region, a police spokesman said.

The reporters had been in the semiautonomous region of Puntland for about a week, regional police spokesman Abshir Abdi Jama said.

Christie's held an auction of punk memorabilia on Monday.

From the Guardian:

A Russian politician ordered the assassination of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, defence lawyers claimed yesterday at the trial of three men accused of involvement in her murder.

BBC TV news producer Kate Peyton was shot in the back by an Islamist gunman mere hours after arriving in Mogadishu, Somalia in February 2005.

Her family believes the Beeb pressured her into accepting a very dangerous assignment.

From The Globe and Mail's editorial about the report to the CHRC recommending that the criminal law be used to prosecute online hate crimes:

The hate-speech provision of the rights act is much broader than the hate law in the Criminal Code. It requires only a likelihood that the speech will cause hatred or contempt, rather than an intent to promote hatred. The wording is broad enough to encompass written material that uses satire to achieve its aims, or that reflects stereotypes, or merely seems to. There is no defence of fair comment. It allows the commission (or people who complain to it) to take aim at those who give offence. Yet open debate in a democracy is grounded in the right to offend. “Any attempt to exclude from public discourse speech that stereotypes or defames the members of an identifiable group would require extraordinary intervention by the state and would dramatically compromise the public commitment to freedom of expression,” says Richard Moon, a law professor at the University of Windsor, in his report. “Because these less extreme forms of discriminatory expression are so commonplace, it is impossible to establish clear and effective rules for their identification and exclusion.” Stick to banning expression that incites violence, he says, wisely, and leave it to the Criminal Code, rather than the rights act. (His recommendation that we need a mandatory national press council, if the voluntary provincial ones don't become more vigorous, would be a ridiculous way of enshrining what he objects to in the human rights act.)

The silliness of having human-rights bodies supervise the news media was on view in human-rights complaints against an article by Mark Steyn in Maclean's. The article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” fell well within the bounds of reasonable debate. Putting Mr. Steyn and Maclean's in front of a rights tribunal is the real offence in a democratic society.

I would idly note that the B.C. human rights tribunal did not find against Maclean's.

But I would ask what accountability mechanisms for the media the Globe would suggest in the event that some publication does carry on a vendetta against an identifiable group.

Personally, I think it would be nice to see some clear-eyed, methodologically rigorous, reasonably objective analysis of how the MSM covers minority communities and see whether we really do have a problem of (insert aggrieved group here)ophobia.

If you use Twitter (you might not if you aren't a big-city-livin', charcuterie-eatin', iPhone-usin' social media evangelist), then check out Mr. Tweet.

It's a twitter network-mapping tool.

The most useful part of it is helping you find people you might wish to follow.

The least useful part is identifying people who follow you (and who you don't follow for a reason).

From the BBC:

A former US TV news presenter who hacked into a rival's e-mail and leaked gossip to the press has been sentenced to six months under house arrest.

A report commissioned for the Canadian Human Rights Commission says that agency should get out of the business of policing online hate and make leave it up to the criminal justice system.

However, Richard Moon, a constitutional law expert and the report's author, also recommends that media accountability be improved.

CBC.ca has a 'your view' thread going asking for people to comment on what influence they think the media is having on the recession.

Surprisingly, only 12 comments.

Most of those would suggest that the media is sensationalizing the issue and therefore is making matters worse.

I would note that the noted alarmist, one S. Harper of 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, has said the world faces its greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression -- a big shift from his pre-election messaging.

B. Obama, set to move into the White House in late January, has called the situation a crisis of historic proportions.

And the media are being too negative?!?!

Back when I covered courts in Regina (a depressingly long time ago), any accusations of  "sensationalizing" usually came when I faithfully reported the facts of a sensational case. Reporting the facts does not constitute sensationalism. A media outlet is sensationalizing when it makes something appear more spectacular than the facts would warrant.

Unfortunately, we won't know for years whether the news media's coverage overestimated, underestimated or got the gravity of this current situation just right.

But given the words of those charged with leading us out of this mess, not to mention the empirical evidence of economic troubles, I don't believe the media is overestimating the problem.

User-generated content is slipping in importance on YouTube as major media corporations increasingly use the video site as a distribution channel for their own wares.

From The Globe and Mail:

Web advertising continues to do well in the United States despite a down economy.

Online ad revenue totalled almost $5.9-billion (U.S.) in the third quarter, up 11 per cent from the same period last year.

For the first nine months of the year, online advertising revenue in the United States totalled $17.3-billion, compared with $15.2-billion in the same period last year, according to The Associated Press.

About 10 per cent of all money spent on advertising in 2008 is going toward online ads, according to Britain-based advertising company ZenithOptimedia.

Addendum

That news is actually from last Friday, although it was in Monday's G&M. Here's how Forbes reported it on Nov. 21:

... Comparing the latest figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau to its Q307 report shows how much growth has slowed.

While online ad spending approached $5.9 billion this past quarter, in Q307, when the IAB said revenues hit $5.2 billion, it had gained 25.3% over the prior year.

Although online ad dollars had already been slowing last year consider the difference from Q306, when web-based advertising was up 33%.

Forbes concluded online advertising revenues should be considered flat when compared to Q1 and Q2.

So maybe the news wasn't so great after all.

From CBC.ca:

An Afghan man who worked with CBC reporter Mellissa Fung said Monday he immediately flagged down a policeman after she was abducted, but was told it wasn't the police's responsibility to help them.

Shokoor Feroz, who was held for questioning in connection with Fung's Oct. 12 abduction, was released by local authorities on Monday after appeals from the CBC and Fung herself.

A "fixer" who works as a translator and guide for foreign reporters, Feroz was arrested in the hours after Fung's abduction and held for questioning. He had been working with CBC reporters in Afghanistan for about three years.

Addendum

I was under the impression Fung's driver had also been taken into custody, but today's story -- at least at the time I read it -- didn't have any update or reminder about that person's fate.

Fortunately, there's an RSF news release:

Reporters Without Borders welcomes today’s release of two local employees of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - brothers Shokoor Feroz, a fixer, and Qaem Feroz, a driver - who had been held by the National Directorate of Security, an intelligence agency, since CBC reporter Melissa Fung’s abduction on 12 October

"We thank President Hamid Karzai and the many other Afghans and Canadians who interceded on behalf of the unjustly detained Feroz brothers," Reporters Without Borders said. "The protests by CBC’s journalists and management illustrated in an exemplary manner that the defence of the local employees of foreign media should be a priority. The Afghan authorities should compensate the two brothers for their six weeks in detention."

From the NYT:

After getting through most of this year unscathed, luxury brands are suffering. Rich consumers who were relatively insulated from the economic downturn continued spending, but that has changed in the last few months. While luxury spending began to fall slightly from June, in October alone, it dropped 20.1 percent, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which estimates consumer spending in the retail and service sectors.

That drop-off means more bad news for magazines and newspapers in the United States that had grown increasingly dependent on luxury advertising.

Ad pages at the top luxury magazines fell 22 percent year over year for the December issues, according to Media Industry Newsletter. Vogue, for example, dropped from 284 pages last December, to 221 pages this December, while Food & Wine went from 160 pages to 126, according to the newsletter.

NYT headline from Nov. 23: For laid-off journalists, free blog accounts

My headline from from Nov. 17: Sign of the times - The Typepad bailout for journos. :)

Twitter actually announced the program on Nov. 14. From the NYT:

On Monday morning, (Six Apart's Anil Dash) had roughly 50 e-mail applications in his inbox, and they have continued to pour in, totaling nearly 300 so far. “It was a bit of a surprise how quickly word got out,” Mr. Dash said. “This has struck a nerve.”

From the NYT:

They cannot perform in public. They cannot pose for album cover photographs. Even their jam sessions are secret, for fear of offending the religious authorities in this ultraconservative kingdom.

But the members of Saudi Arabia’s first all-girl rock band, the Accolade, are clearly not afraid of taboos.

The band’s first single, “Pinocchio,” has become an underground hit here, with hundreds of young Saudis downloading the song from the group’s Web site. Now, the pioneering foursome, all of them college students, want to start playing regular gigs — inside private compounds, of course — and recording an album.

“In Saudi, yes, it’s a challenge,” said the group’s lead singer, Lamia, who has piercings on her left eyebrow and beneath her bottom lip. (Like other band members, she gave only her first name.) “Maybe we’re crazy. But we wanted to do something different.”

Typepad has offered to ride to the rescue of journalists losing their gigs by offering them a deal on blogging, including participation in an ad network, but will the marketplace support a small army of journalistic blogs? Some say no, especially in the current advertising trough period.

And I delve briefly into the notion of crowdsourcing as another piece of the business puzzle for journalists.