From the Guardian:

A Brazilian politician who fronts a popular television crime show is being investigated for allegedly ordering a series of executions in a bid to boost his ratings.

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From the Huffington Post. The current top five: Bacon World, the bacon bra, the bacon dress, bacon cupcakes and bacon lip balm.

Jsource.ca obtained a memo sent from Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse to his staff outlining changes in the management team. An excerpt:

Today’s changes are driven by three basic principles – collaboration, innovation and talent. I’ve brought together and promoted editors who are excellent at working together, who don’t build walls around their sections and who know our best work is done by many. These are people who believe the next decade for our business will be significantly different than the one we’re exiting – and it’s ours to invent, so long as we have the right people and right skills.

Moving forward ….

There will be three main content groups – news, features and business – each headed by a senior masthead editor reporting to me. These will be supported by three other groups – resource management, digital and presentation – that also report to me but have responsibility to the content groups, too. It sounds complex but is actually simpler. The support groups are there to ensure we have the best people and the most innovation on the go. The content groups make it happen. Fewer walls. More integration. Much more innovation.

Also, I opted not to have a deputy editor. Why?  Too often the position exists only for the times when an editor-in-chief is not present. I have a good team that in the last while has been very much working like one. In fact, the cooperation between sections has been stunning to watch. Less hierarchy helps with that. I want a flatter organization, stronger section editors, better coordination and more support for each department.

Here’s how:

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped the presses on March 17. Its bigger rival, the Seattle Times, reported a jump in circulation in June. However, the P-I website is hanging in there.

And interestingly, some other former Seattle newspaper journalists have started up web operations of their own.

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The former Toronto model turned TV newsreader for state TV in Chechnya insists she has complete freedom to report the news as she sees fit.

Ri-i-i-ght.

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From the Aug. 5 Globe and Mail:

Almost a year into her captivity in Somalia, Amanda Lindhout said her health, both physical and mental, is deteriorating.

In a phone call to a Canadian media outlet, the kidnapped freelance journalist from Sylvan Lake, Alta., also said she is shackled and being kept in a dark room.

“I don't want to die here and I'm afraid I'll die in captivity if I don't get help soon,” she told OMNI TV on Monday. “I don't know how much longer I can bear this.” ...

In the call, Ms. Lindhout pleaded with her family to deal directly with her captors and Ottawa to intervene to pay a $1-million ransom. The teary statement was similar to previous calls to other media agencies.

“My government must have some duty to help me,” Ms. Lindhout said, “I love my country and I want to return so I'm begging, I'm begging my government to come to my aid.”

Bandits captured Lindhout and Australian photographer Nigel Brennan on Aug. 23, 2008, so the big 0-1 is coming up.

From the Guardian:

The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch suffered the indignity of seeing his global empire make a huge financial loss yesterday and promptly pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, the Sun and the News of the World, by next summer.

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From the Aug. 5 Toronto Star:

CBC's senior programming brass has a secret plan to move the public broadcaster's flagship nightly news program The National from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. to make room for more prime-time entertainment programming, an industry watchdog group says. The plan was strenuously denied yesterday by Kirstine Layfield, the executive director of English network programming.

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John Ibbitson, the Globe and Mail's Washington bureau chief, had a few thoughts on American political culture that I'll excerpt here:

... Americans love to argue, and much of what they yell at each other is crazy talk. ...

Americans argue so furiously because there is much to argue about: the health-care and immigration systems are utterly dysfunctional, and the administration and Congress are racking up trillion-dollar deficits with no clear understanding of how to bring them down.

They argue because U.S. society is cleaved by region, race and class more deeply than in Canada. But they also argue because they care. They believe their federal government matters and they have strong opinions about how that government should act.

Canada always struggled to define itself as a nation, and in recent years appears to have given up that struggle, retreating into regional isolation. What Canadian federal politician has a clear sense of what this country should look like in the 21st century?

Politics in America is loud, rude, messy and sometimes deeply weird. But at least the U.S. matters to its citizens.

Do we keep quiet because of our famous politeness? Or is it that we just don't care?

Now with that, here's a little taste of American crazy. Hear U.S. President Barack Obama described as a "long-legged, half-breed, usurper, illegal alien" -- by a black preacher ... who then goes on to predict that white people are gonna rise up with guns!

From YouTube:

And so at the behest of their corporate overlords, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann ending their public sniping at each other.

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Veteran Atlantic journo Parker Donham adds to the discussion of Wafergate and the St. John Telegraph-Journal in this July 30 post, to wit:

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Actually, the title for this posting by author Steven B. Johnson is Can We Please Kill This Meme Now?

It's a vigorous rebuttal of the notion that only newspapers provide a sublime experience of serendipity.

Jeff Jarvis is something of a provocateur. The author of What Would Google Do? was weighing in on the weekend about the multiple errors by one Alessandra Stanley of the NYT in her look at the career of the late CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite when he made a faux pas, especially embarrassing considering the subject matter.

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Wired editor Chris Anderson on how social editing is displacing traditional news outlets as his source of news.

I say, oh really?

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U.S. journalist Sarah Lacy posted this weekend that she's thinking of pulling back from social media. Why? The sometimes-nasty nature of the social web.

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This story offers some insights that relates back to my post about why conservative commenters to online news stories appear to be much angrier than people of other political ideologies.

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NYT public editor Clark Hoyt is shaking his head over the astonishing number of inaccuracies in a retrospective of former CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite's work by staff TV critic Alessandra Stanley.

I also engaged in an incomplete online convo with journalism critic and author Jeff Jarvis about open-source editing.

Finally, I clip some advice from Craig Silverman on preventing errors in the first place.

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Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who quit with 15 months left in office, has had a spokesperson deny rumour-mongering by an anonymous blog and simultaneously launch an attack on the news media, for, uh ... contacting her to see if the rumour was true.

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