• J-Source

    Lindhout/Brennan kidnapping anniversary

    (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…

  • J-Source

    Censoring journalists in Afghanistan

    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….

  • J-Source

    Off Keillor on journalism

    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 …

  • J-Source

    News Corp to charge for online news

    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…

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    Banish “off the record” briefings

    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…

  • J-Source

    Private data sent to media list

    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…

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    Dream job/fantasies

    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…

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    An American Radicals brand of investigative journalism

    I.F. Stone made significant contributions to investigative journalism at a time in the U.S. when holding powerful institutions to account was seen as unpatriotic and disloyal, writes Cecil Rosner in this review of D.D. Guttenplan’s new biography American Radical The Life and Times of I.F. Stone.