As Canadian officials react to increasing public opposition to cost overruns and local impacts of the Vancouver Olympics, the independent media seems to be paying the price. Just as Democracy Now's Amy Goodman was held in November for trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games, Martin Macias, an independent media reporter from Chicago, was detained and held for seven hours by Canada Border Services agents before being put on a plane and sent to Seattle. Macias, who is 20 years old, is a media reform activist with community radio station Radio Arte where he serves as the host/producer of First Voice, a radio news zine. Macias described a chilling scene of detention and expulsion. "I was asked the same questions for three and a half hours in a small room. They told me I had no right to a lawyer. I went from frustrated and angry to scared. I didn't know what the laws were or how the laws had been changed for the Olympics...why the crackdown?"

Olympia Newswire launches this week. Join its Facebook fan page for updates.

This week, when Washington State legislators start work on the first day of the State’s legislative session, a new group of journalists will be there covering the news. Newly launched by independent journalist Trevor Griffey, Olympia Newswire is an independent, non-profit news collective, whose small staff of experienced reporters will push back against a steady erosion of the Olympia press corps.

Nothing frustrates me more than watching journalists who've lost their newsroom jobs entering the blogosphere... with no clue as to what they should be doing online. Too few emerging online journalists understand that the function of news publishing has changed in the Internet era. Simply reporting the news, however you might define that, is no longer enough, not when you are publishing in such a competitive environment. The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters... they've become community organizers.

When it comes to independent, agitational journalism, the standard is Amy Goodman and her radio/television institution, Democracy Now! Goodman and her staff often finds themselves accosted by officials, foreign and domestic. This happened again on Thursday. But it didn't happen in East Timor or Burma. Goodman was detained by our neighbors to the north.

Canadian border officials held Goodman in Vancouver for 90 minutes when she attempted to enter Vancouver to attend events launching her new book, Breaking the Sound Barrier. But the Canadian Border team didn't care what she was there to do. They wanted to know what she was going to say. They demanded to see her computer and notebook. They searched her car. They returned her passport with papers demanding she leave the country within 48 hours.

With the deaths of at least 12 journalists in Monday’s massacre in Maguindanao, the Philippines has earned the dubious distinction as the world’s most dangerous place for journalists to work, according to an international media watchdog.

In a statement on its website, the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said the country effectively supplanted Iraq, where an armed conflict has been raging, as the most dangerous place for journalists.

Washington Blade, Southern Voice and a handful of other gay publications natiowide have closed their doors after a long-time financial battle to stay afloat.

The publishers closed the papers over the weekend, the newspaper's editor, Laura Douglas Brown, confirmed to the AJC on Monday.Employees arrived at the newspaper's offices off of Briarcliff Road early Monday to find a door locked and a sign posted on the front:

"It is with great regret that we must inform you that effective immediately, the operations of Window Media LLC and Unite Media LLC have closed down."

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At the recent Harvard session on new business models for news, I offered an off-the-beaten-path idea to the question of who will pay for the news. One answer, I said, was non-news organizations: NGOs, trade associations, businesses, governments and labor unions.

Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations - Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union.

The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from "special-interest" labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - labor-backed newspapers.

The Obama administration and key Democrats have reached a tentative agreement on a proposed law to provide greater protections to reporters against being fined or imprisoned if they refuse to identify confidential sources.

Under the proposed agreement, a so-called media shield law would allow federal judges to quash subpoenas against reporters if they determine that the public interest in the news outweighed the government’s need to uncover the leaker – including, in some circumstances, disclosures of classified national security information.

The proposal would also extend coverage to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news information.

Less than 24 hours after hosting the National Association of Black Journalists at its headquarters in Washington, National Public Radio let go the black journalist in charge of its newscasts, Greg Peppers, one of two black men in newsroom management at the network.

Peppers, who has been with NPR since the 1980s, was escorted out of the building Friday, colleagues said. He was executive producer of NPR's newscast unit.

"We don't comment on [an] employee's reasons for departure or any other personnel matters," spokeswoman Anna Christopher told Journal-isms.

Over 200 people gathered in downtown Denver for a Save the News event organized by Kim Humphreys of I Want My Rocky and Josh Stearns and Craig Aaron of Free Press Wednesday night Sept 16. Stearns stated "a vital part of the news ecosystem" was lost 6 months ago when Rocky Mountain News was closed by the E. W. Scripps corporation. Three months prior to the Feb 27 final edition Humphreys found out her employer was being put up for sale. She had the idea to organize because, as the site says, "Without watchdogs, our democracy won't work. As journalists, we can't be objective about our own existence."