Cutting off Wikileaks' access to credit card processors. Enlisting the government to help police copyright. Giving their own content more favorable access to their networks. These are just some of the ways technology companies are impeding free speech, Dan Gillmor writes in Columbia Journalism Review. Gillmor also discusses how journalists need to upgrade their technological skills and equipment to protect their sources from government prosecutors or worse.

Anything on the popular Last Word on Nothing site, according to a post by Heather Pringle: "Currently, the Last Word on Nothing.com is persona non grata in China, blocked from its millions of computers. The country’s Great Firewall — the massive internet censorship operation masterminded by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing — has risen up against us and struck our website down." She also explains how to tell if your site is blocked.

Meredith Cochie put a quite a show at a recent SPJ conference with her advice for students, Dan Reimold writes on College Media Matters. For example, take the "overzealous student who politely and repeatedly accosted her with business cards and clips and questions about job prospects ... Some of his early approaches were a bit abrupt and artless, but his overall persistence and speak-to-strangers-in-positions-of-power courage enabled him to earn a name for himself."

An MIT panel recently batted that question around, and Andrew Phelps has a summary on the Nieman Journalism Lab site. The answer may be yes, Phelps writes, but with caveats — including who does the labelling and who reads them: "Descriptive labels, rather than prescriptive labels, connote truth. But who is to determine the ingredients of a news story? And if we know how much of our news intake is opinion, celebrity gossip, and fluff, will that change our behavior?"