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More in the debate about micropayments, news nightmares and dreams for a better tomorrow. Today’s contestants: social media guru Clay Shirky vs journalist Nicholas Carr.

Chinese journalists who break their government’s reporting rules face being put on a new blacklist, adding to an array of controls used to restrict its domestic media, reported the Guardian. State-owned media in China today reported that the body that controls the sector plans to “establish a database of media professionals with a bad record.”…

Tony Burman, formerly former editor-in-chief of CBC News and  now managing director of Al Jazeera English, said Israel’s decision to prohibit foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip during the recent war left the field open to Al Jazeera, which had a massive audience spike. And that, reported the Vancouver Sun’s Doug Ward, “just might…

“They asked me why I was asking about arms. Then they said they wanted me to leave the country:” Reporters Without Borders tells the story of Canadian-Egyptian journalist Heba Aly’s expulsion from Sudan…

Michael Cooke will become the new editor of the Toronto Star on March 1, the paper announced. Cooke replaces…

The Canadian Press has made its Stylebook and Caps and Spelling Caps and Spelling guides available for sale online, for $6.25 per month. The advantage, it says, is a reporter can access it from anywhere in the world. Hmmm. For $75 per year I think I’ll just keep using the dead-tree version that’s beside my…

“The corps of journalists covering Washington D.C. at the dawn of the Obama Administration is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed,” said a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report used the word shock in describing the degree to which “what we once thought of as the mainstream news…

Profits at Canada’s biggest private television broadcasters plunged by almost 93 per cent last year, said a report from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Amid comments about the Canadian Press story on the Globe and Mail site (why does the Globe not at least rate the angry torrent of drivel?) is this sage observation:…

In yet another twist on user-pay, US-based Spot.us solicits reader donations to cover the cost of journalistic investigations. The problem? The reporting just isn’t very good, says James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times.

What on earth are the British thinking these days, aiming their guns at their messengers? The Brits harassed five top financial journalists who appeared at a government hearing in London to defend themselves against accusations their reporting caused panic and helped escalate the financial crisis in the U.K. Reported a story on CBC.ca: “An independent…