On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, a co-ordinated wave of violence aimed at Germany's and Austria's Jews swept those countries, leaving up to 92 dead (plus at least 30 more in Austria), synagogues destroyed, thousands more homes and businesses ransacked -- and people deported to concentration camps.

The event became known as Kristallnacht -- Crystal Night, or the Night of Broken Glass.

Many saw it as a prelude to the Holocaust.

From CBC.ca:

Fung was on her second tour in Afghanistan and had been in Kabul nearly a month when she was taken. Her driver and translator, or "fixer," were overpowered, and later government authorities detained them for questioning.

The fixer remained in detention on Sunday, but Cruickshank said he's hopeful the man will be released soon.*

* CBC Radio's The World This Weekend said both men were still in custody.

If you're new to this, Mellissa Fung, a CBC TV reporter, had been captured by Afghan bandits and spent four weeks in their control. They released her on Saturday.

Earlier posts:

• Fung speaks
• The Fung kidnapping

Addendum

CBC's 6 p.m. radio newscast has someone from Reporters Without Borders supporting the decision of Western news organizations to stay mum about Fung's kidnapping. This information didn't make it into the CBCNews.ca story at the time I wrote this.

RWB issued a news release, but it didn't touch on the blackout issue.

Addendum 2

The CBC editors' blog is silent about Fung. See this earlier post.

The Afghan government has released a video of CBC journalist Mellissa Fung being interviewed by an Afghan government official. In it, she talks about her four weeks as a captive of Afghan bandits.

A prime example of a lazy Twitter feed at BlogTO:

From CP via globeandmail.com:

Quebecor Inc. chief executive officer Pierre Karl Péladeau has taken personal control of Sun Media Corp. and the Canoe online operation after the newspaper sector reported "disappointing" third-quarter results. Mr. Péladeau replaces Sun Media president Michael Sifton, who took on the job in September, 2007, after Quebecor's takeover of his Osprey group of Ontario newspapers.

According to a Financial Post story, Sifton had this to say:

"I am happy to have been given the opportunity to integrate Osprey Media in Sun Media organization. I leave behind talented people and a strong team that will no doubt successfully take on the challenges that our changing environment is bringing," said Mr. Sifton in a statement.

Sun Media made money, but not enough under Mr. Sifton's tenure. There are many others besides myself who will find Mr. Sifton's fate ironic.

The Alberta-born journalist is still in captivity in Somalia.

As you have no doubt heard, CBC News reporter Mellissa Fung has spent the last month in the involuntary company of some Afghan bandits, but regained her freedom on Saturday.

However, the news that Canadian news organizations kept the matter quiet over that period has stirred some debate.

They've created the position of communities editor, to be filled by new media columnist Mathew Ingram, who has been with the site since its inception in 2000.

From The Globe and Mail:

A Quebec Superior Court judge yesterday ordered Globe and Mail reporter Daniel Leblanc to cease reporting on negotiations between Ottawa and a firm targeted by a massive federal lawsuit in the sponsorship program.

In Albany, Ga., a majority-black city, black people who once faced jail, beatings and job loss for demanding the right to vote saw a black man elected to their nation's highest office on Tuesday.

Check it out.

To me, it's a fantastic use of Flash animation.

There's a little slider to allow you to scan through other U.S. presidential election maps going back to 1992 -- the first victory by Bill Clinton.

You can zoom into a given state to see county-level results.

Not enough for you?

You can see "bubbles" at the county level in another view to see how badly one party is whupping the other's ass. In comparing the candidates' home country results, John McCain took almost 55 per cent of the vote in Maricopa County, Ariz. for a 12-point lead; Barack Obama took 76 per cent in Cook County, Ill. for a 53-point lead. Needless to say, the blue bubble of Cook County was much larger than the red bubble for Maricopa County.

The voting shifts option lets you see at a glance how the Republicans actually picked up strength in the mid-South, from Arkansas to West Virginia.

So far as I can see, this is way more sophisticated than anything attempted by Canadian news organizations in the Oct. 14 federal election, but such are the economies of scale.

Robert Niles of Online Journalism Review thinks there's actually quite a lot.

See it all here.

This Washington Post story opens by talking about two Ohioans who are heavily involved for their respective parties in the 2008 -- Republican Chris Myers and Democrat Katie Stoynoff. Both have used social media as a political organizing tool.

MSNBC and Fox News don't appear to be covering the same presidential race in the United States.

Montrealer Barry Julien has won a Peabody award for his work on The Colbert Report. Here's how he got there. And interestingly, in some ways, he thinks of his work as journalist-like.

From the Guardian blurb: "As the U.S. goes to the polls, liberal Americans are gripped by anxiety that they will suffer a repeat of their 2000 disappointment while right-wingers rail against 'a socialist takeover.'"

The following excerpts from a Don Tapscott commentary on globeandmail.com advancing ideas from his new book, Grown Up Digital, should be read in conjuction with two other recent posts:

• The Web 2.0 campaign
• The decline of autos and newspapers

The first lesson appears to be start by sucking in aides in at the bottom and working one's way up. Oh, and don't leave a callback number.

The Globe and Mail's Andrew Ryan runs down a list of top pundits.

Five of the nine on the list are ex-politicos rather than career journos.

Two others are neither fish nor fowl -- Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are court jesters. They will be hosting InDecision '08 on the Comedy Network.

In 2004, Democrat Howard Dean harnessed the power of Meetup and fundraised in small amounts from a large base of donors -- and finished third in Iowa.

In 2008, Democrat Barack Obama took online social media tools to new heights, won Iowa and his party's nomination, has raised obscene amounts of money, and may well be the president-elect of the United States by late Tuesday.

The NYT says not since John F. Kennedy became president in 1960 has a new technology had such an impact on a U.S. presidential election. But it also cautions that the old media remains powerful.

On Oct. 9, 2007, Esther Enkin, then-acting editor in chief of CBC News, welcomed people to the editors' blog.

"Let the conversation begin," were the closing words of the inaugural post.

CBC News hasn't had anything to say through its blog since June 13.

Since then, the only two editorial pronouncements of note came from John Cruickshank, publisher of CBC News -- and they were billed as letters from the publisher, and not as more egalitarian postings on the editors' blog.

One was on the Mallick cock-up, and the second trumpeted CBC's performance on election coverage. Comments were opened up (there appeared to be a good mix of both positive and negative comments towards CBC), although I didn't notice any direct responses by Cruickshank.

It would appear that one person now speaks for CBC News, and it ain't through the editors' blog. And it ain't really a conversation.

Unfortunately for McCain, the election hasn't happened yet.

And unfortunately for the Denver Post, the test run of their online election results system showed up on the live site. A reader spotted the results on Saturday night.

You can get the story at Denver Westword's Latest Word blog.

(h/t to Romenesko)

As the only media outlet covering this historic election, The Onion will again double the size of its War For The White House staff to provide uninterrupted coverage of the results on November 4th and 5th.

 

Included in our unprecedented and unmatched offering will be up-to-the-minute exit polling data and voter suppression incidents, covering not just voters, but non-voters as well. In addition to comprehensive print and video coverage, we will offer live blogging from the best political blog team in the blogosphere. Finally, once the results are in, we will provide the most critical piece of election analysis: a complicated, multi-colored map.

 

Tune in to our election coverage on November 4th and 5th at www.theonion.com

The collapse of Canada's most scurrilous satirical magazine has been noticed by the gnomes of Eighth Avenue.

From the NYT:

Yahoo News, by some measures one of the most popular news Web sites in the country, has repeatedly broken its own traffic records during the election year. The news arm of the search engine expects Tuesday’s day of voting and Wednesday’s day-after to raise the bar higher still.

“Yahoo has taken its place as the great starting point for any big event,” said Neeraj Khemlani, the vice president for programming and development.

   more »

From the NYT:

IT is no surprise that Burlington, a city whose biggest exports include the jam band Phish and Ben & Jerry’s, has a chill, socially conscious vibe. But for all its worldliness — antiglobalization rallies and fair-trade products abound — Burlington has lately turned an eye to the local. The Lake Champlain shoreline has undergone a renaissance in recent years, with gleaming new hotels, bike and sailboat rental shops and parks with sweeping views of the Adirondack Mountains. But perhaps the strongest emphasis on local can be found in the city’s developing restaurant scene, where menus are now filled with heirloom tomatoes and grass-fed beef from (where else?) Vermont. And you’re practically required to wash it all down with a local microbrew.

I stopped there once, many years ago, while en route to Boston. Had a chicken sandwich prepared by a sidewalk vendor that was absolutely delicious!

From Publishing 2.0 (posted Oct. 29), but seen via a tweet by CityTV reporter Kris Reyes:

Most newsrooms have utterly narcissistic Twitter accounts. The worst offenders (which unfortunately is the majority) use services like Twitterfeed to automatically tweet links to the newspaper’s own content. Here’s our RSS feed on Twitter! Don’t get enough of our content on our site or through RSS? Now get it on Twitter, too!

CanWest has lost two-thirds of its value in just two months. One share can be had for less than a dollar. Debt is seen as a $3.6-billion albatross around CanWest's neck, but a company spokesman says it still produces solid results every quarter.

On Friday, the Associated Press sent out a report, based on a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, claiming a pro-Obama bias in U.S. network news coverage of the presidential election.

I'm not so sure about the study's methodology.

NYT public editor Clark Hoyt thinks the U.S. news media might be getting a tad presumptive about the outcome of Tuesday's presidential election.

This is an interesting observation in a David Carr column:

“The auto industry and the print industry have essentially the same problem,” said Clay Shirky, the author of “Here Comes Everybody.” “The older customers like the older products and the new customers like the new ones.”

The U.S. critic A.J. Liebling once wrote that newspapers are "the weak slat under the bed of democracy."

Toronto Star public editor Kathy English also agrees with this statement by Liebling: "I am an incorrigible optimist about newspapers" -- a view she holds despite the ongoing financial difficulties in which newspapers find themselves.