This is some of what’s caught my atten­tion in the past hours:

• Tony Blair appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stew­art | Guard­ian — “The former prime min­is­ter exploited a flaw in The Daily Show concept… answer a dif­fi­cult ques­tion earn­estly, even bor­ingly, and you can be sure that Stew­art will be forced to change the sub­ject sooner, in order to keep things funny.”
• Journ­al­ists Lose at Har­vard | The Har­vard Crim­son — “Hav­ing learned to write news, I now dis­trust news­pa­pers as a source of inform­a­tion, and I am often sur­prised by his­tor­i­ans who take them as primary sources for know­ing what really happened. I think news­pa­pers should be read for inform­a­tion about how con­tem­por­ar­ies con­strued events, rather than for reli­able know­ledge of the events themselves.”
• Dear Journ­al­ism Industry, aka Jo | The Bobby Pin — “I read that with mixed feelings. I totally get the need for sta­bil­ity, decent pay, etc., and yet, there’s still some­thing to being a reporter that I, at least, can’t seem to shake off.“

  Good luck with your new gig! I’m sure you’ll miss the news­print side of life, but you’ll do great at whatever you’re plan­ning, too. (PR, right?)

• Tele­graph journ­al­ist: I’m pess­im­istic about the new news­room cul­ture | Media | guardian.co.uk — “The report­ers who wrote the news were almost the defin­i­tion of “hacks” – writ­ing to order, keep­ing to a for­mula, preach­ing to the shires. They were cer­tainly pro­fes­sional. They were good at what they did and kept you read­ing all the way to the end of the piece. But, unless it was a juicy court case, it was not facts they were report­ing. Their mis­sion was to demon­strate that Tory Bri­tain was alive and well and would ulti­mately defeat the evils of Socialism.

  One of the iron­ies of this approach was the undoubted fact that a num­ber of the journ­al­ists were them­selves Labour voters, even activists.”

• RTS Wales Pub­lic Ser­vice Broad­cast­ing Event | Ofcom — “[I]t is worth high­light­ing the debate around dir­ect gov­ern­ment fund­ing espe­cially because the Scot­tish Broad­cast­ing Com­mis­sion looks to the UK Gov­ern­ment to fund its sug­ges­ted chan­nel which it estim­ates will cost between 50 and 75 mil­lion pounds a year.
  It may well be that the SBC was influ­enced by events here in Wales where there is already have a suc­cess­ful example of dir­ect fund­ing of pub­lic ser­vice con­tent, in the shape of S4C’s fund­ing from the DCMS, where arms’ length over­sight has ensured that inde­pend­ence has been retained.”
• Hitler’s rise and stock prices | vox — Around the globe, polit­ic­ally con­nec­ted firms are more valu­able (Fac­cio 2006). Nazi Ger­many was no dif­fer­ent, but the sheer mag­nitude of the con­nec­tion premium is astound­ing. Why did early con­nec­tions with the party pay off as hand­somely as they did? We do not know if loy­alty was rewar­ded with addi­tional con­tracts, loans on favour­able terms, or in some other way such as priv­ileged access to for­eign exchange.
  What is clear is that not enough firms sought to affil­i­ate with the Nazis prior to Janu­ary 1933 to drive the expec­ted bene­fit – as seen by stock mar­ket investors – down to zero. This means that either many firms expec­ted the bene­fits from asso­ci­ation to be low (the Nazi party’s rise to power may have been a genu­ine sur­prise), or that they would not con­tem­plate giv­ing sup­port for a vari­ety of polit­ical reasons.