Afghan journalist Tahir Ludin explains how he and NYT reporter David Rohde escaped from the clutches of the Taliban in North Waziristan, Pakistan. The stuff of movies, I tell you.

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Judy Sims of TorStar posted the following to her blog: The new economics of media and thestar.com.

It's worth reviewing.

From CTV.ca:

A Canadian journalist has been detained in Iran, as authorities extended their crackdown on those protesting last week's disputed election to include those covering the demonstrations.

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Media company strategist Steve Yelvington has a great post on his blog entitled Death to the 'death of journalism' meme.

If you're interested in media issues, it's short, sweet, insightful and well worth a read.

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And check out the new beat they have planned for him.

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Local 87 M of Communications, Energy and Paperworkers, the union that represents Globe and Mail workers, voted overwhelmingly to give its bargaining committee a mandate to call a strike if need be.

Now let's hope it won't be needed and that a negotiated settlement can be reached (note, I work for CTV News, which is part of CTVglobemedia. The Globe and Mail is a corporate cousin to CTV).

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Seven months ago, David Rohde of the New York Times went to interview a Taliban leader in Afghanistan and didn't come back. He had been taken prisoner, long with two Afghan colleagues

Rohde and one of his colleagues escaped Saturday from his captors' clutches in North Waziristan, Pakistan, so as with CBC's Melissa Fung, his story can now be told.

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Don Newman, one of the grand old men of Canadian political reporting, broadcast the final episode of his Politics show on CBC Newsworld.

The House of Commons gave him a round of applause.

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From CBC.ca:

The prime minister of Somalia offered new hope Thursday that Canadian freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout, abducted outside Mogadishu almost 10 months ago, could soon be freed.

Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke told CBC News that he didn't want to speak publicly about the situation because it's "still a very sensitive case."

But he said, "I'm very optimistic that in the very near future we will have freed those two journalists."

From CBC.ca:

New Brunswick's only French-language daily newspaper is cutting costs by laying off six workers and cancelling a pay increase that was to go into effect on July 1.

L'Acadie Nouvelle reported in its Thursday edition that the employees losing their jobs include two photographers and a sports reporter.

Francis Sonier, assistant general manager of L'Acadie Nouvelle, said the newspaper has seen a 10 per cent drop in revenue since the economy began faltering.

The staff also accepted a one-week unpaid leave. Otherwise, cuts might have been deeper, said Francis Sonier, assistant general manager of the paper.

A frivolous meme on Twitter tonight was #nicertitle; re-write the title of a film to make it just a little big more pleasant.

Here's my efforts (real name in brackets):

• Unhealthily Obsessive Attraction (Fatal Attraction)
• Romper Tread-Lightly-er (Romper Stomper)
• OK, I Have Some Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (No Sympathy for Lady Vengeance)
• The Unauthorized Diversion of Pelham 123 (The Taking of Pelham 123)
• The Good, the Anti-Social and the Aesthetically-Challenged (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)
• Ichii the Kisser (Ichii the Killer)

Matt McCann, a student journalist at the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal who did a story on faculty and students at the University of New Brunswick protesting the awarding of an honorary degree to Premier Shawn Graham, found himself shitcanned for his efforts.

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From Reuters via TheStar.com:

About 480 workers at Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper will vote this weekend on whether to give their union a strike mandate amid tense negotiations over a new contract, a union official said Tuesday.

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The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders took a closer look at the results of the European Parliament elections. He finds there's reason to believe the Europeans aren't actually partying like it's 1933.

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This list from Paste magazine offers up what it calls the top 25 foreign-language films of the 2000s so far.

I've seen 19 of the 25 on the list. My tastes largely coincide with those of listmaker Jeremy Medina.

From a June 11 Independent article:

Modesty may not be Gladwell's natural mode, but nor is he arrogant in any unpleasant way. But, yes, sir, he did do the necessary apprenticeship to become excellent at what he does. "There is this moment of mastery that descends," he offers. It happened for him as a reporter one afternoon in 1993 when a gunman had opened fire on a Long Island commuter train. Gladwell was the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post at the time. With the first deadline almost upon him, he made it out to the scene and dictated the entire front-page story over the phone without writing down a single word.

"In my first years I wouldn't have conceived of doing it," he says. "I just got on the phone and called it in and didn't think twice about it." He has since done a "back-of-the-envelope" calculation of the hours spent writing for the paper up until that day. Ten thousand hours, of course. "It's a marvellous moment. There is a reason why cognitively complicated jobs require long apprenticeships."

He puts journalism into this category deliberately. His other employer, aside from his publisher, is The New Yorker magazine, and his next submission will be an essay on the craft of news reporting and why it must be coddled and sheltered in an age of struggling newspapers. What makes him "mad" he says, is the notion that a newspaper is merely "a monopoly protected by printing press and that the thing being called a journalist is the chance to write the news, as if there isn't this separate set of skills that are difficult to acquire and worthy of preservation. You can't start blogging at 23 and call yourself a journalist."

The Swedish daily Aftonbladet did an investigative feature entitled Do We Dare Get Old in Sweden. It involved hiring movie-makeup artists to turn a 28-year-old reporter into an 82-year-old woman.

More than 100 people were also interviewed, and 20 outrageous examples of health system incompetencies were uncovered. The series is still causing reverberations.

How much do you think it cost to produce?

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That would be the analysis of former U.S. diplomat Gary Sick.

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Christie Blatchford expresses disdain for the media feeding frenzy that engulfed Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt over a five-month-old tape recording of a private, candid moment in which Raitt referred to the medical isotopes file as "sexy."

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