We've updated the story with a comment from AllNovaScotia's Caroline Wood and CBC's Nancy Waugh, below.
Well, not many. But at least a couple dozen. The director of news content at The Chronicle-Herald tweeted today:

Rick Conrad is the Herald's web editor:

nealozanoNeal Ozano

@Dantheeditor You must have mentioned them by mistake, or followed one of their stories a little too closely. They hate that.

Dec 14FavoriteRetweetReply

CitizenWilliamsCitizen Williams

@nealozano@dantheeditor Yep, mention them and you're history.

Dec 14FavoriteRetweetReply

in reply to @CitizenWilliams↑

@rickconrad
Rick Conrad
@citizenwilliams@nealozano@Dantheeditor My personal account was eliminated too. Oh well. 30 bucks extra for beer.
Dec 14 via HootSuiteFavoriteRetweetReply

AllNovaScotia is the subscriber-based news website launched seven years ago. From a King's Journalism Review feature about them:

AllNovaScotia.com is a website that focuses on business and political news in Halifax. It publishes an issue every weekday, usually about 15 stories. It has a staff of 11 people. The style is crisp, old school news. Clean copy, as they say. With minimal advertising and no fancy design, virtually all of AllNovaScotia’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Most of its subscribers are businesses, which pay a single rate to provide access to all of their employees. Without that access, a visitor to the site would have no idea what stories are being covered. AllNovaScotia goes so far as to code all of its issues in Flash, so stories can’t be found on any search engine.

The Flash construction of the website also prevents readers from copying any of the text, and pasting it elsewhere. You can't share AllNovaScotia stories. You can't Tweet about them, email them, post them to Facebook, or easily quote them. It's even hard to print them off.

This may be a surprise to people who aren't journalists, but we copy each others story ideas a lot. If we're a CBC reporter, maybe we read something in the paper one morning, and come up with something different to do on the same topic to do for the evening news. We don't just copy story ideas: sometimes we copy story details, too. We take a number one reporter came up with and use it into our own story (edit: hopefully with credit, or by matching it by repeating the research another did). We take a quote spoken to a different outlet, and repeat it, or use it to get a response from somebody new ("The Mayor said "Councillor Jenkins can go smoke a pipe. Councillor Jenkins, do you like smoking pipes?"). In other words, we borrow.

The ethics are always arguable, and there's a certain amount of resentment one has to shoulder when your story gets stolen and no credit goes to you, but it happens. At OpenFile, we try to link to all the external sources of our reporting, but non-web based outlets have different conventions.

But AllNovaScotia doesn't like to be borrowed from. Information is their commodity, and they protect it jealously. When borrowing happens, they don't just stew over it. They do something about it, because they can.

They crack down. At one point, they cut off the subscriptions of all of the reporters in the CBC newsroom, because the CBC was borrowing too much of their reporting on the radio news. They kicked the staff of Frank Magazine out in March 2011 (some reporters just started using the login of someone whose name was not associated with the magazine, even though AllNS also tracks logins and can ban users who share theirs too freely).

I'm always nervous about reading AllNovaScotia. I don't want to surreptitiously absorb any knowledge which I might later unknowingly insert into something I write, somehow, and cause my subscription to be terminated, too. AllNS is kinda the the They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named of the Halifax media scene.

The revocation of the Chronicle-Herald's "dozen or more subscriptions" (according to Leger) doesn't necessarily have to do with story stealage, but that's what the Twitter chatter hypothesizes. The Herald has recently launched an expanded business section that competes directly on AllNovaScotia's turf.

AllNovaScotia publisher Caroline Wood and subscription coordinator Sophie Wood are out of the office today, but we'll try to contact them again tomorrow for comment on why the Herald was banned.

UPDATE #1:

We spoke to AllNovaScotia publisher Caroline Wood today (she was out of the office yesterday afternoon when we phoned).

Wood clarified for the record some of AllNovaScotia's subscription policies which result in subscriptions being cancelled.

"AllNovaScotia sells information." They started ten years ago, based on the premise that people would pay for well-researched content produced by the best journalists.

"We sell only to licensed individual subscribers who agree not to redistribute the information." Wood says subscribers agree to that, because "they agree that any redistribution would threaten our business model."

They prefer that we at OpenFile make no reference even to their headlines (like we did in this collection of articles about NSCAD), because they do not want to encourage any re-posting of information from their site. (After the conversation with Wood, we at OpenFile will no longer reproduce AllNovaScotia headlines, not even for the purpose of linking to their site.)

It helps, perhaps, to think of AllNovaScotia not as journalism, but as information. This is a somewhat academic argument, I realize, but sometimes as consumers of news we have a responsibility to think about the stuff behind it.

Kovach and Rosenstiel define the Elements of Journalism in their book of the same name as follows:

Journalism's first obligation is to the truth
Its first loyalty is to citizens
Its essence is a discipline of verification
Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover
It must serve as an independent monitor of power
It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise
It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
It must keep the news comprehensive and in proportion
Its practitioners have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience

The parts in bold are the elements of journalism that AllNovaScotia does not conform to.

Because the website is run by journalists, and employs journalists, we tend to think of AllNovaScotia as an outlet for journalism. But, because they guard their content so jealously, they are not serving the general citizenry. They serve their clients, who are people who need the information AllNovaScotia offers and can afford to pay for it.

As the King's Journalism Review points out, AllNovaScotia's clients include business people and politicians (16 out of 17 councillors asked). If a journalist's job is to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," as one of my journalism professors once said, AllNovaScotia's job is to inform the comfortable. The afflicted do not factor, and probably do not pay for subscriptions anyway.

There's nothing wrong with that. But it should change what the public expects from them. In this context, AllNovaScotia's cancelling of journalist's subscriptions to their information service does not come as a surprise.

AllNovaScotia is not a media outlet: it is a source of information. And, in journalist-speak, all their information is ‘off the record.’ Journalists routinely run into sources of information that do not want what they know to be quoted publicly—who want to speak ‘off the record,’ or not speak at all. Journalists come up with different ways to deal with those sources—we pester them, we find other people who will tell us the information we need, we dig, we ask different questions, we barter. The journalists who can get the information they need, despite the roadblocks, go on to be the best journalists.

As local newsrooms figure out how to interact with AllNovaScotia's information, it simply pushes the newsrooms who do have to do journalism to become better journalists.

Here is the full text of Wood’s statement:

Allnovascotia.com was launched 10 years ago with the belief that people will pay for well-researched content produced by skilled journalists who are proud to put their name on their work.

We have gone from two reporters to a newsroom staff of fourteen people thanks to a growing base of loyal subscribers.

Unlike other internet publishers who support their business by advertising, Allnovascotia.com sells information.

We sell only to individual licensed subscribers who agree not to redistribute our information.

They do so because they understand that any redistribution threatens our business model.

The fact the model is working in this tiny corner of the globe when publishers in big cities around the world have been challenged to create a successful content pay model is amazing to me.

And I am going to do everything I can to make it a continued success.

UPDATE #2:

Nancy Waugh, the executive producer of CBC News in Nova Scotia, says that AllNovaScotia did suspend CBC’s user accounts for a few days back in August. “In the end for us, we don't need it. It's not a necessary way to spend however many hundreds of dollars a month that it was adding up to.” Not only does the CBC have “a pretty wicked team of reporters,” but “the Herald has really beefed up their business coverage in the past month,” and business news isn’t the CBC’s primary area of focus.