This blog is tak­ing a vaca­tion (to the home of the brave…etc.). We all need one, as Robert Reich points out.

In the mean­time feel free to explore some of the other stuff here — there are my favour­ite posts over on the right, and if you plug a word in to the search box you can find almost anything…

Back late August.

• FT Profit Up, Subs Flat, Con­fid­ent On Ad Out­look| paidcontent:UK
  Non-paying regis­tra­tions, of course, have tripled since the switch, from almost 150,000 to 500,000 at present — so FT.com isn’t con­vert­ing many of these to pay­ing subs but is try­ing to mon­et­ise them through other means, like dir­ect marketing…
  (tags: financial-times rev­enue)
• Allen West: Politi­cian Figured Al Jaz­eera Booker Was Kid­nap­per | Gawker
  How dumb? That dumb.
  (tags: al-jazeera-english)
• Journ­al­ists charged | Yemen Times
  The south­w­est cap­ital court issued an order relat­ing to the sen­ten­cing of three journ­al­ists for pub­lish­ing art­icles for some of Arab writers such as Mohammed Has­san­nein Haikal, and Mr. Abdul­bari Atwan.
  (tags: yemen press-freedom)
• Mak­ing It: Barack Obama | The New Yorker
  Per­haps the greatest mis­con­cep­tion about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolu­tion­ary. Rather, every stage of his polit­ical career has been marked by an eager­ness to accom­mod­ate him­self to exist­ing institutions…
  (tags: barack-obama us-politics)
• How Steve Jobs Leaked That He Doesn’t Have Can­cer | Seek­ing Alpha
  After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs him­self, the very inform­a­tion he was refus­ing to share with the share­hold­ers who have entrus­ted him with their money.
  (tags: pri­vacy steve-jobs public-information)
• No charges for U.S. troops over reporter’s death | Reuters
  R.I.P. “No charges will be brought against U.S. troops believed to have shot dead ITN journ­al­ist Terry Lloyd in Iraq…”
  (tags: terry-lloyd)
• In study, evid­ence of liberal-bias bias | LA Times
  Study of a visual medium notes: “Visual images and other more sub­ject­ive cues are not assessed.” LA Times writer con­cludes: “But the track­ing applies a meas­ure of ana­lyt­ical rigor to a field rife with seat-of-the-pants fulminations.”
  (tags: barack-obama cov­er­age)

• The blog edit­ing sys­tem in action | Scobleizer
  if I get it wrong the people who actu­ally know the truth will jump on me fast and furi­ously and that blogs arrive at the truth faster BECAUSE of the par­ti­cip­a­tion of every­one involved.
  (tags: scoble blogs edit­ing journ­al­ism)
• When Will A Com­ment Be Treated Like A Post On Techm­eme? | A VC
  Scoble said today that we have a well func­tion­ing blog edit­ing sys­tem in action. Well sort of. But the fact remains tens of thou­sands read Scoble’s broad­side on Hornik and VCs and a small frac­tion of them read David’s reply.
  (tags: blogs com­ments scoble)

• What does Rupert Mur­doch Want? Paul Steiger hasn’t a clue | Slate Magazine
  There is no bad Mur­doch. There is no good Mur­doch. And Steiger knows it. There is only Murdoch.
  (tags: rupert-murdoch news-corp wall-street-journal)
• The Grow­ing Own­er­ship of Private Equity In Media | The Media Business
  The [Clear Chan­nel] sale is [part of] … a grow­ing trend for private equity pur­chases of media firms… [It] stems from the fact that the mar­ket value of many does not reflect the under­ly­ing cash flows and asset val­ues or the mid– to long-term prospects.
  (tags: clear-channel private-equity media valu­ations)