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A Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decided that a section of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which bans Internet hate messages, is unconstitutional because it violates free speech protections.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has pressed his Iranian counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, to release detained journalist Maziar Bahari, said news reports. A CBC story is here; Agence France-Presse reports here; the background on Bahari’s case is on the web site freemaziarbahari.org.

Peerless photographer Annie Leibovitz may be the latest victim of America’s bad debt crisis and nationwide recession — and also, said an Agence France-Presse story, “of her own relentless artistic ambition.” “How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz? The $24 million question,” asked New York Magazine. “Her debts now total a staggering $24 million, consolidated…

(This post updated Aug. 22) It’s nearly a year since Canadian Amanda Lindhout and Australian Nigel Brennan were kidnapped in Somalia. The families of the freelance journalists released a statement asking for continued privacy. Previously this summer, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Canada and Australia should do more to help free them. Reporters Without…

None of the previous incidents of censorship in Afghanistan (here and here, to cite just two of the more egregious examples) come remotely close to this week’s ban on news media coverage of Taliban violence during the presidential elections….

Garrison Keillor’s writing can dazzle. That’s one reason I sometimes read him. Another reason is that his oddball incoherence can free a reader to cherry-pick sentences …

Rupert Murdoch announced his News Corp.-owned publications — which in North America include the Wall Street Journal and The New York Post — will charge for online news, within one year. It’s not soon enough — and the blogosphere is already screaming…

A movement among U.S. media organizations and journalists seeks “to end the practice whereby officials insist their remarks remain ‘off the record’ at large public events,” reports  Editors Weblog. It excerpts a column by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander: “Standing in front of 300 people and declaring your words to be ‘off-the-record’ is frustrating for…

An employee at a British Columbia bank inadvertently emailed a list of hundreds of people’s insurance claims to 75 provincial media outlets, reported CBC. This is a classic blooper, one that seems to be repeated every few years by some hapless worker. I worked as a desker at Canadian Press in Halifax some 20 years…

For many of us, journalism was once the ultimate dream job. (And even in dire times, it still is for a lucky or plucky few.) Now the dream has turned to fantasizing — about alternative employment. Fantasies such as, writes the New York Times’s Judith Warner after surveying her colleagues, turning a Master’s of Journalism…