Keith Vaz announces decision soon after hearing evidence from senior police officer involved in original investigation

The chair of the home affairs select committee today launched a new inquiry into the use of unauthorised phone hacking.

Keith Vaz announced the move soon after hearing evidence from John Yates, the senior police officer involved in the original investigation.

The development came as it emerged that David Cameron's PR chief, Andy Coulson, faces police questioning over his role in phone hacking during his time as the editor of the News of the World.

Coulson has repeatedly insisted he was unaware of the practice being used by members of his reporting team.

The former editor is at the centre of allegations made by Sean Hoare, one of his former reporters, last week. Hoare claimed Coulson "actively encouraged" him to hack into people's voicemail messages.

The Metropolitan police is facing renewed pressure over its handling of the original case amid fresh claims that its 2006 investigation into phone tapping by the Sunday tabloid lacked rigour and missed the scale of the intrusion into people's privacy.

The committee will now investigate the definition of the offences relating to unauthorised hacking or tapping and the ease of prosecuting such offences.

It will also look at the police response, especially the treatment of those whose communications have been intercepted, and what police are doing to control such offences.

Vaz said: "The evidence of [Met police] assistant commissioner John Yates today raised a number of questions of importance about the law on phone hacking, the way the police deal with such breaches of the law and the manner in which victims are informed of those breaches.

"I hope that this inquiry will clarify all these important areas."

It will be the second inquiry conducted by MPs. Earlier this year, the culture, media and sport select committee published a highly critical 167-page report condemning the "collective amnesia" and "deliberate obfuscation" of News of the World executives who gave evidence to them.

The report said it was inconceivable that only a few people at the paper knew about the practice of illegally hacking the phones of public figures.

Earlier today, Yates told the home affairs select committee that, in light of new material published last week in the New York Times, police were likely to interview Coulson – now Cameron's most senior aide – and "take stock after that".

During his evidence to the committee, Yates gave the first indication of a concession that the Met's original phone-hacking inquiry could have been more thorough.

He said it may have been better if the officers had interviewed "the Neville person" – Neville Thurlbeck, the paper's chief reporter, who was named on correspondence relating to phone hacking.

Yates told MPs police were considering new material following the "very serious allegations" made last week by Hoare.

Yates gave evidence a day after the Labour MP Tom Watson warned that British democracy risked becoming a "laughing stock" around the world unless the phone-hacking allegations were fully investigated.

He refused to be drawn on whether the criminal investigation would be reopened, telling MPs the suggestion of an ongoing live investigation was "a matter of semantics".

The hacking scandal blew up again when the New York Times published a lengthy article including the claim that Coulson freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques during his time as editor of the tabloid.

He resigned as the editor after the tabloid's royal reporter and a private investigator were jailed.

But Hoare told the NYT that, when he worked with Coulson at the Sun, he had personally played recordings of hacked voicemail messages for him and that later, when he worked for him at the News of the World, he "continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits". Coulson "actively encouraged me to do it", Hoare said.

Yates said police would see Hoare "at some stage in the near future and consider what he has to say" and would then consider the necessity of seeing Coulson. He told MPs: "But at some stage I imagine we will be interviewing Mr Coulson."

Yates said Scotland Yard's attempts to seek help from the New York Times had been rebuffed. The US paper had already indicated it was not prepared to help the police, citing journalistic privilege, he added.

The assistant commissioner told MPs colleagues had written to the NYT again to urge them to waive that privilege because of the "quite exceptional circumstances" surrounding the case, but admitted he was "not hopeful".

He refused to say who was on the list of people who may have had their phones hacked, but confirmed Lord Prescott was not among them.

MPs were told that being on a list did not mean someone's phone had been hacked. Yates told them the police only found evidence of crimes being committed in about 12 cases.

Watson, who in the Commons yesterday issued a point-by-point rebuttal of arguments by ministers and News International dismissing calls for a judicial inquiry, today urged Yates to look further than just Hoare's claims.

"John Yates has said that he'll investigate the new allegations made by Sean Hoare, but has steadfastly refused to investigate his strongest lead – the existence of an illegally hacked phone message provided by Glenn Mulcaire and transcribed by News of the World reporter Ross Hall," he said.

"If anything in this case is a smoking gun – establishing that Clive Goodman was not just a rogue reporter – it is this.

"The Met police continues its disdainful disinclination to actually investigate this case. The public and parliament expect answers. He should interview Ross Hall."

Yates had earlier indicated to the committee he felt interviewing Hall would make no difference to the inquiry.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy has joined that elite bunch of TV types, mostly comprising BBC weathermen, who have had a song written about them. The Krishnan Guru-Murthy song is a catchy number which even earns the grudging praise of the man himself. "This isn't flattering, but it is funny, I suppose." You can see what he means with lyrics like "He's the underdog, the Buzz Aldrin of news" and "When he gets home he begins to cry because he's been outshone by Jon Snow's tie". We particularly like "The show's not all Jon, it's only two-thirds".

Mark Thompson is expected to contact staff in the next couple of days, though details of the new package remain under wraps

BBC management will reveal within the next couple of days the concessions it is offering staff over changes to their pensions to try to avoid impending industrial action.

It is understood that the director general, Mark Thompson, plans to update staff via email on the new package being put to unions and designed to plug what BBC management claims is a £1.5bn-£2bn deficit. Thompson is expected to give some new ground, but details have so far been kept under wraps.

It is understood that a proposal to use the BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, and BBC Television Centre as asset backing for an equity bond to try to close the deficit has been rejected by the corporation as unworkable.

Thompson's email may be sent as early as tomorrow, when he is due to appear before MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee along with Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust chairman. Thompson and Lyons are due to answer questions about the BBC's annual report, but are likely to be asked about the pensions issue.

However, some BBC insiders said that if Thompson does reveal the concessions he is offering, the move could damage the negotiations with broadcasting unions, which are still ongoing.

Last week, BBC staff who are members of the three broadcasting unions – Bectu, the National Union of Journalists and Unite – voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action over the proposed changes to the final salary pension scheme.

However, an announcement on strike dates was deferred until talks between unions and BBC management conclude on 16 September. If negotiations fail to resolve the dispute, strike action could begin seven days later.

A staff meeting with BBC pension trustees is also due to take place on 14 September.

A BBC spokesman said: "We will update staff as soon as we can on proposals."

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The Sun isn't the only newspaper to launch its own perfume, it would appear. So has the Guardian, with a tasty little fragrance called G-Spot. It smells like an Apple – "the computer, not the fruit", says the blurb, for people who like a "light sprinkling of liberalism all over their views ... G-Spot. For your body politic." It's at this point we should say the perfume is the invention of the good people of The Poke. So please – don't ask us where you can buy it. No matter how much you wish it was true.

Journalism.co.uk will be at tonight’s ‘Sex, bugs and videotape’ debate organised by Intelligence Squared. Given this week’s renewed focus on phone hacking at the News of the World and debates on the privacy of footballers and public interest, tonight’s proceedings are pretty timely.

Proposing the motion that the private lives of public figures deserve more protection from the press will be Rachel Atkins, a partner at Schillings law firm; and Max Mosley, no stranger to the News of the World and secret videotaping himself.

Speaking against the motion are Tom Bower, journalist and author of books on Robert Maxwell and Richard Desmond; and Ken MacDonald QC, defence lawyer and former director of public prosecutions.

You can follow tweets from the event with the hashtag #iq2privacy or in the liveblog below:

Sex, bugs and videotape – privacy and the media debateSimilar Posts:

• Comment Is Free: Meyer wrong to ‘pour scorn’ on Mosley, says lawyer
• Press Gazette: Mosley sues NoW in French courts over Nazi orgy story
• More from Dacre: The Daily Mail editor on Max Mosley and ‘Flat Earth News’
• TimesOnline: News of the World acted like ‘Peeping Tom’ with Max Mosley video report, court hears
• Myler on Mosley: ‘I make no apologies for publishing that story as editor’

My favorite word this week is heterarchy.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a favorite word before, and I confess I was not familiar with the meaning of this one when I saw it in an article from one of those scholarly journals at which journalists like to scoff. So I turned to merriam-webster.com, as I usually do when reading online, but good old M-W left me high and dry. My next stop was Google, and that’s how seeking a definition of heterarchy led me to the Web site — oops, website (damned AP) — of a former Boston Globe columnist.

You’d have to be an idiot to say technology endangers serendipity.

Journalist David Warsh defined my new favorite word thus in his column titled Learning to Love Heterarchy: “a structure with no unfailingly superior authority.” Then he continued:

The term was coined in 1945 by Warren McCullough, the legendary Massachusetts Institute of Technology neurophysiologist, to describe the organization of the brain. (Was there ever a better laboratory for organization theory than World War II?) McCullough showed the brain to be an overlapping system composed of many parts working together, with many shortcuts and back-channels among them, some capable of overruling others, orderly, but not hierarchical.

This information was so satisfying, I read the entire column. It turned out to be a book review, essentially, of What Is Happening to the News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism, by Jack Fuller, who retired as the president of Tribune Publishing in 2005. Far from having spent a career in a suit, Fuller was a teen copyboy at the Chicago Tribune and held a variety of positions in between.

The title of Fuller’s book totally put me off — it has zero appeal because it does not promise to tell me anything I don’t already know from watching the decline of this field, my field, for several years now. Warsh, however, clued me in to the real substance of the book: “Fuller has been on a journey among the philosophers, neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists,” seeking answers to why people like what they like, and why they choose the information sources they choose.

What’s all this have to do with heterarchy?

Boning up on the latest brain science, Fuller has learned that human brains are naturally heterarchical (like the Internet, which adherents like to say routes around damage, such as censorship). Warsh considered the hierarchy of limited, consolidated media (pre-Internet):

Becoming more heterarchical, it seems to me, had been what’s happening to the news business. There was a time when the industry was built around a nicely ordered, mostly hierarchical arrangement of daily newspapers. Most big cities had one or two, along with three television network affiliates, a public broadcasting station, and whatever remained of the once-great radio networks. But the increasing use of the wireless spectrum, satellites, cable and fiber-optic networks and the Internet changed all that.

Heterarchy: The human brain has evolved to prefer it.

“The internet needs you,” I said to Howard Stern when I called into the show this morning as he was ranting about his contract negotiations with Sirius XM and the possibility that he could take his show and more to the net.

Do it, Howard.

“You made satellite radio,” I told him. “You will make the internet.” For Stern is the one media entity who can absolutely, positively get people to pay online — even me, the alleged opponent of all things paid. Today I pay $12 a month for Stern — more, actually, with my internet account and my wife’s and son’s cars. Stern is talking about charging $5 a month and for that we’d get his radio show plus his TV shows plus much more, even music — and no advertising (“why should I hire a sales force?” he asked).

Sold.

Why the hell would I pay for Howard Stern and not pay for news? Because Howard is unique. News isn’t. There’s no end of potential competition for any news provider and its unique value expires in seconds. Not so Howard. Arianna Huffington was wrong when she says that people will pay for business news and porn. There’s no need to pay for porn because there’s no scarcity of people who will strip and shtupp in front of a webcam. But there’s only one Howard.

I wrote about Howard’s potential internet empire here. Fellow Howard fan Doc Searls wrote about the potential here. Way back in 2005, I wrote an open letter to Sirius’ Mel Karmazin urging him to embrace the internet and see satellite as just as transitional delivery mechanism for his valuable content (ignore the fucking spam links on the post). He didn’t listen. Apparently, he’s not listening to Howard, either.

Fine. Even though I’m a Sirius shareholder and even though his departure would lead to a plummet in the stock price (from 2¢ to 1¢), I want him to leave because he will turn the internet into a credible, sustainable, mass entertainment medium. The delivery’s tricky but that will be fixed quickly as we carry connected devices all the time, everywhere: our phones, computers, TVs, cars, tablets, and devices we can’t imagine will all be connected (if the phone companies don’t fuck it up). The critical last six inches for Stern are not his penis but the means by which his show gets from my phone to my car speakers. But it’ll be cheaper to install a bluetooth transmitter than a Sirius radio. If we millions of Stern fans went to the trouble of subscribing to and installing Sirius, we’ll do it with something even easier that gives us the entire internet all the time.

For Stern, the economics have to be extremely tempting. He should not work for a company. (Howard: Don’t get sucked into signing on with another employer!) He should be the company. He can charge us less than half what we pay now. He can build the infrastructure for next to nothing (as he said today, he can build a studio — big deal). All he needs is a billing mechanism (Paypal?) and a bandwidth provider (Akamai?). He won’t need to market; he already is viral. And he gets to keep the profits. Sweet.

For us, we get to listen to Stern whenever and wherever we want. (Howard: Please let us listen to repeats on our own schedule, on demand!) We pay less and don’t suffer through ads for itchy-ball cures.

For the internet, we get to prove to unique entertainers everywhere that they can cut out the middlemen — networks, studios, all that — and create valuable relationships directly with their fans, getting much richer in the process. And that, in turn, forces entertainers, studios, networks, and cable companies to sell us entertainment a la carte, so I can stop paying for the damned 95% of my channels I never watch.

What’s not to love?

Do it, Howard. Leave old technology. Build the next medium, our medium. To hell with all the old media companies that have screwed you and us all these years. This is real freedom.

Duncan takes chief executive role at luxury car dealer, having left Channel 4 last November

Andy Duncan, the former chief executive of Channel 4, has been appointed to the same role at luxury car dealer HR Owen.

Duncan, who left Channel 4 after five years as chief executive in November 2009 and received almost £1.5m for his final 11 months as part of a departure deal, will join the company on 4 October. He will have a seat on the HR Owen board and takes over from Nick Lancaster, who left the company in May.

"It is a real coup for the company to attract an individual of Andy's calibre," said Jon Walden, the chairman of HR Owen. "His outstanding track record in general management, marketing and sales, together with his extensive experience of the fast-changing new technology of the internet, will be highly beneficial as we build our business for the future, and we are looking forward to working with him."

Before joining Channel 4, Duncan was head of marketing at the BBC, where he was one of the architects of Freeview, and prior to that had a 17-year career in marketing at Unilever. Duncan has been responsible for brands including I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, PG Tips and Bachelor Supernoodles.

HR Owen reported a pre-tax profit of £726,000 in the six months to the end of June, down from almost £6.5m in the same period last year. However, the £6.5m figure included an exceptional one-off gain of £7.5m meaning that HR Owen actually moved back into trading profitability in the first half of this year.

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The new Google service will bring the web to TV screens – the announcement comes a week after a new version of Apple TV was unveiled

Google will launch its Google TV service, which it intends will bring the web to TV screens, in the US this autumn and around the world next year, its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said today.

In its sights will be a slice of the £117bn global TV advertising market – which it will want to add to its online advertising revenues, which totalled $22.9bn (£14.94bn) in 2009.

The announcement, just a week after Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, unveiled a miniaturised version of his Apple TV, which lets people rent films and TV shows, and stream content from YouTube, shows that the television set has become the new battleground for the two companies, which are also competing for market share in the smartphone and tablet computer markets.

On the latter topic, Schmidt told the closing session of the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin that Google will announce partnerships later this year with computer companies making tablet computers rivalling Apple's iPad, and that they will use Google's new Chrome operating system for computers rather than its Android product, which has been used so far on smartphones and a slew of tablet computers announced at the IFA show.

Schmidt said the Google TV service, which would allow full internet browsing via the television, would be free, and that Google would work with a variety of programme makers and electronics manufacturers to bring it to consumers.

But Google does not envisage becoming a programme producer in its own right, as that does not fit its model – which is to use other people's content rather than to create its own. The only content that Google produces itself is Street View, which has been the source of a number of privacy complaints in various countries.

"We will work with content providers but it is very unlikely that we will get into actual content production," Schmidt told journalists after his speech.

Google TV will consist of software written by Google embedded into hardware made by other companies: in the US, Schmidt said, it will launch on three products – an HDTV set and a Blu-ray player from Sony, and a set-top box from Logitech. Google will also run a marketplace for small apps to run on Google TV. The content will use Adobe's Flash Player, used on video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Demonstrations of the TV at the show suggested that it will look like a simplified computer interface, with widgets offering information about the weather, time and calendar, but also with links to web browsers, Facebook, email and YouTube.

However, there is still doubt about how easy it will be to integrate content intended for viewing on a computer with that for a TV set. Google's own guide for developers says that "all input devices for Google TV will have QWERTY keyboards" but adds that "users needs interactions that are fast and easy to do – at a distance, with one hand, in the dark." It also hints that people may be able to control the screen via a mouse, but admits that "mouse control is difficult" on a TV set that is on the other side of the room from the user.

Law experts dismiss police claims that they cannot investigate if victim has already listened to phone message as 'nonsense'

Claims by police and prosecutors that cases of hacking into voicemails could not be investigated if the victim had already listened to their message were dismissed as "nonsense" today by experts in the law surrounding interception.

Addressing the home affairs select committee today John Yates, the assistant Metropolitan police commissioner, repeated earlier claims by police that cases of hacking into voicemails could only be prosecuted if the victim had not yet listened to their messages.

"That is nonsense, and a recurring problem with this police position in this case," said Simon McKay, author of Covert Policing Law & Practice. "The police are getting confused about a number of things relating to the evidential status of a voicemail.

"The law is that in the nanosecond between someone's voice being converted into an electromagnetic system and being transmitted to the recipient who listens to the voicemail, that's the course of transmission. At some point between these two points the hacker has been diverting a copy for his own use, and that is an offence."

Experts say that although the law under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa), which governs the interception of phone communications, is complex, draft government guidelines clarify the illegality of hacking into voicemails.

Those guidelines on the use of the act states that it is illegal to intercept communications "at any time when the communication is being stored on the communication system in such a way as to enable the intended recipient to have access to it", which experts say includes voicemails.

"I don't know where the police are getting this interpretation from," a senior lawyer close to the case said. "It's well known that Ripa is not the clearest piece of legislation, but these guidelines seem pretty clear."

The Crown Prosecution Service said that it stood by its interpretation of the law, which it gave during evidence to the culture, media and sport select committee in July 2009.

"We stand by what we said to the committee and do not wish to add to it except to say that in bringing the prosecution we interpreted the relevant law following careful consideration and advice from very experienced counsel," a CPS spokesperson said.

Last week, the Guardian launched a network of science blogs with a goal that perfectly mixed science with blog: “We aim to entertain, enrage and inform.”

Now, on the paper’s website, you can find hosted content from four popular and well-respected blogs: “Life and Physics” by Jon Butterworth, a physics professor at University College of London who does work with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; “The Lay Scientist,” the pop-science-potpourri blog by researcher and science writer Martin Robbins; the science policy blog “Political science” by former MP Evan Harris; and “Punctuated Equilibrium,” by the evolutionary biologist known as Grrrl Scientist.

The idea is both to harness scientific expertise and, at the same time, to diffuse it. “This network of blogs is not just for other science bloggers to read; it’s not just for other scientists,” says Alok Jha, a science and environment correspondent who came up with the idea for the network and now — in addition to his reporting and writing duties — is overseeing its implementation. The network is intended to reach — and entertain/enrage/inform — as many people as possible. “We’re a mainstream newspaper,” he says, “so everything we do has to come about through that prism.” And it marks another small shift in the media ecosystem: the media behemoth and independent bloggers, collaborating for audiences rather than competing for them.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because the new network is a direct response to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s goal of journalistic “mutualization.” (Okay, okay: mutualiSation.) “It’s good to have criticism from scientists when we do things wrong,” Jha notes, “but it’s also good to have them understand how we write things — and give them a chance to do it.” Guardian reporters don’t spend days in the control room at CERN; someone who does, though, is Jon Butterworth. Having him and his fellow scientists as part of an extended network of Guardian writers benefits both the paper and its readers. “The science desk here will essentially become a channel for these guys to report from their worlds they’re all seeing,” Jha notes. The scientists “are going to lend a bit of their stardust to us”; in return, they’ll get exposure not just to a broader readership, but to a more diverse one, as well.

The Guardian network comes at time when science blog networks populated by writers with particular — and highly focused — areas of expertise are proliferating. Last week, the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals emphasizing the biological sciences, launched its own 11-blog network. PLoS Blogs joins Wired Science, Scientopia, and others. And, of course, science blogs have been in the news more than usual of late, with ScienceBlogs and the scandal that was PepsiGate. That scandal — in which PepsiCo tapped its own “experts” to contribute content to the otherwise proudly independent blog network — didn’t precipitate the Guardian’s own foray into science blog networking, which has been in the works since this spring. However, “it certainly accelerated everything,” Jha says. “I think there was soul-searching going on among the bloggers out there: ‘What do we do next? How do we do it?’ And that, in turn, gave the Guardian staff the sense that, okay, now is the time to do it.”

The general value proposition here is the most typical one: “more content” on the side of the media outlet, and “more exposure” on the side of the content providers. Many scientists are interested in writing, Jha points out; but there are far fewer who understand the mysterious alchemy required to successfully pitch stories to news organizations. The blog setup reframes the relationship between the expert and the outlet — with the Guardian itself, in this case, going from “gatekeeper” to “host.”

The upshot of all that, for the scientists, isn’t exposure in the Huffpostian sense, in which getting your name out there = money. The Guardian pays the bloggers for their work. Which is a matter of principle as much as economics: Even though some of the scientists were already writing their blogs without compensation, Jha notes, “we thought we can’t possibly just take a blog for free, because it would be exploitative.”

The solution: a 50/50 ad revenue split. The Guardian sells ads against the bloggers’ pages; the bloggers, in turn, get half the revenue from the exchange. But this being an experiment — and web ads being notoriously fickle, even on a high-traffic site like the Guardian’s — the arrangement also includes a kind of financial insurance policy for the bloggers: If ad revenues fall below target, they’ll revisit the deal.

Though the blogs’ flags vary, they feature, in their Guardian presentation, a uniform tagline: “HOSTED BY THE GUARDIAN.” Which is a way of clarifying — and reiterating — that, though the blogs’ content is on the Guardian’s site, it’s not fully of the Guardian’s site. “The idea is that this is not an internal reporters’ or editorial blog,” Jha says. “It’s these guys — it’s their thoughts, independent of all interference.”

And “independent” really means “independent.” The blogs aren’t edited — for content or for copy. Unlike some other newspaper/blog hosting arrangements (see, for example, Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight is licensed by The New York Times — and whose content is overseen, and edited, by Times staff), the Guardian’s science blogs are overseen by the bloggers themselves. For these first couple weeks, yes, a Guardian production editor will read the posts before hitting “publish.” But that’s a temporary state of affairs — a period meant to work out technical kinks and to foster trust on both sides. The goal, after this initial trial period, is to give the bloggers remote access to the Guardian’s web publishing tools — something, Jha notes, “that no one apart from internal staff had been able to do before.” The vision — a simple one, but one that’s nicely symbolic, as well — is that the bloggers will soon be able to publish directly to the Guardian site, with no intermediary. “It’s a completely new model for us,” Jha notes — because, at the moment, “nothing here is unedited.”

Jha is well aware of the potential for legal headaches that accompanies that freedom — a potential that’s particularly menacing in the U.K., whose legal system plays so (in)famously fast-and-loose with libel. “As a news organization, we’ve been very careful to be on the right side of the law,” Jha says; then again, though, “we’d never try and censor.” Balancing freedom-of-expression concerns with their organizational imperative to protect themselves from liability is something Jha and his colleagues have spent a lot of time discussing in the run-up to the network’s launch. Ultimately, though, the vision won out over the caution. “We always err on the side of ‘let’s publish’ rather than not,” he notes; and, as far as the site’s new bloggers go, the goal is less top-down authority, not more. “Eventually, we do want them to have complete control,” Jha says. “That is the ambition.”

Frédéric Sautereau, Stephanie Sinclair, and Damon Winter were among the top award winners at the annual Visa Pour l’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France.

Under the pretense of "Homeland Security," police in Indiana allegedly confiscated Gabriel Argenta's camera on Monday when the rail fan tried to photograph some passing trains from a bridge.

By Justin D. Martin CAIRO—If by the end of 2011 a meaningful agreement is reached between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, there will be few if any laurels due to an international press for covering the process with disciplined objectivity. “The tendency to predict is one of the strongest and most dangerous urges of newspaper reporters,” wrote former New York Times...

By The Editors In The Moment: President Obama’s inauguration by The Washington Post Killer Blue: Baptized by Fire, U.S. Soldiers in Iraq, by The Associated Press Intended Consequences: Rape as a Weapon in Rwanda, by Media Storm In Beichuan, China, the Agony of Surviving, by Travis Fox, then of The Washington Post Digital...

A long-running labour dispute at the Journal de Montréal is now expected to extend into another phase in late October — with an announcement issued before the long weekend that the newspaper’s locked-out editorial and office employees are gearing up to begin publishing and distributing a free, weekly, French-language newspaper to hit Montreal’s streets this fall. The tabloid will be called Rue Frontenac.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., is offering voluntary buyouts to non-represented, full-time employees who joined the paper prior to Jan. 1, 2006. While the Star-Ledger is not revealing how many buyouts are being sought, Publisher Richard Vezza wrote in a letter to employees that based on its performance over the first seven months of the year, the newspaper is projected to lose $10 million in 2010. This follows the Star-Ledger’s 2009 losses of about $9 million.

CBC radio personality Andy Barrie will join Ryerson University as scholar in residence for the Faculty of Communication & Design...

A preview scene from the upcoming journalism documentary film “Breaking The News.”

In the first part: Scottish design guru, Ally Palmer talks about the generation gaps between newspaper publishers and youth media consumers.

In the second part, Toronto Star Editor-in-Chief, Michael Cooke talks about the revenue problems and where new opportunities for newspapers come from.

== ABOUT THE FILM ==

Breaking the News is a multi-year project that examines the profound and rapid changes in journalism and the effects on news gatherers, consumers and the exchange of democratic ideas.

The film is a touchstone that marks an historic period where journalism is rapidly transforming from a reality of single-copy deadlines to instant news created and consumed in a mobile culture.

The changes in the reporting, distribution and consumption of news is having
profound effects on journalists, publishers and consumers. 

U.S journalist/filmmaker Robb Montgomery is directing the feature-length film documentary as he travels the world and talks with journalists at publishing houses large and small over a multi-year period.

Journalism is immersed in an era of unprecedented change in both scale and speed.

This story bears witness to the contraction of old media empires and, at the same time, the emergence of the new models of newspapers that appeal to a new generation of networked media consumers.

Montgomery recently previewed interview segments from the ongoing documentary, “Breaking the News”, to a room of almost 100 industry leaders in Toronto, Ontario at Ink+Beyond and in Cologne, Germany at the CO/Pop Festival.

His presentation centred around the theme of evolution and how newspapers have to start making revolutionary changes to survive in the natural selection the marketplace imposes on the industry.

Preview scenes from Breaking The News