Unrequired Reading {29.9.08}

These are some of the things that have caught my atten­tion lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news busi­ness, but then so’s life:

• The eco­nom­ics of mov­ing from print to online: lose one hun­dred, get back eight | Monday Note — “Cor­por­ate money will inev­it­ably per­col­ate into news eco­nom­ics through ser­vice con­tracts, requests for expert­ise, cor­por­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion assign­ments. The bound­ar­ies between sec­tors will blur. It already happened in the uni­ver­sit­ies where contract-based private grants co-exist with fun­da­mental research — and to some extent sub­sid­izes it. The same mech­an­ism will occur in the news business.”
• Sky v Gov­ern­ment and Vir­gin (ITV stake) [2008] CAT 25 (29 Sep 2008) | Reckon LLP — “Sky lost. The Com­pet­i­tion Com­mis­sion and min­is­ter largely won.”
• The Élite News­pa­per of the Future | Amer­ican Journ­al­ism Review — Ever heard of the Eco­nom­ist? “The mass audi­ence is drift­ing away, and resources should be focused on the lead­er­ship audi­ence. If exist­ing news­pa­pers don’t do it, new com­pet­it­ors will enter their mar­kets and do it for them.”
• A ‘Tabloid Guy’ Calls It a Night After 41 Years With Mur­doch | NYTimes.com — “When I first came around, there was some very good news­pa­per­men in New York,” Mr. Dun­leavy said. “But increas­ingly, they star­ted lean­ing on this Columbia School of Journ­al­ism thing. That you wanted your mom to be proud. That it was a profession.“Journalism is a craft, like being a mas­ter plumber. We wore white col­lars, but we were blue collar.”
• ITN’s chief exec­ut­ive quits | Digital Spy — “ITN chief exec­ut­ive Mark Wood is to step down from the role after five years, it was con­firmed today.Wood has served as ITN’s chair­man since 1998 and was appoin­ted chief exec­ut­ive in 2003. He will leave the broad­caster early next year but will remain as chair­man for “a period”.”
• Turn­ing to the TV for explan­a­tions and answers | IHT — The recipe for suc­cess on a busi­ness TV chan­nel: “Mark Hoff­man, the pres­id­ent of CNBC, said the net­work had focused for years on “the del­ic­ate bal­ance in busi­ness between fear and greed.“When there’s an aggress­ive move to one extreme or the other CNBC engage­ment surges,” he said”
• Mis­be­hav­ing works out for Toby Young | LA Times — Some­thing from noth­ing: “I thought I was on this upward career tra­ject­ory. And then it all went com­pletely pear-shaped. I really did noth­ing for five years. Van­ity Fair was like a career cul-de-sac. At the end of it, I thought, ‘I have to have some­thing to show for those years.’ I was determ­ined to extract some­thing from nothing.”
• About the Media 100, 2008 edi­tion | Advert­ising Age — What is media? “Media is defined as inform­a­tion and enter­tain­ment con­tent dis­tri­bu­tion sys­tems in which advert­ising (includ­ing branded enter­tain­ment) is a key ele­ment. Rev­enue includes what media com­pan­ies col­lect from mar­keters (advert­ising); from con­sumers (sub­scrip­tions, fees, movie tick­ets, DVD sales); and from other media com­pan­ies (TV licensing/production).”
• DAG closed down | News­pa­per Innov­a­tion — “The 4th Dutch free daily, DAG by PCM and KNP tele­com, closed down after less than one and a half year. DAG had a cir­cu­la­tion of 380,000.High com­pet­i­tion and a prob­lem­atic eco­nomy forced the pub­lish­ers to close the operation.”
• Noth­ing to Fear but Irre­spons­ible Words | Jeff Mat­thews — “What happened to the heroic, forward-looking rhet­oric great lead­ers are sup­posed to provide in times of crisis?FDR gave us “We have noth­ing to fear but fear itself.”

  Churchill gave us “We shall fight on the beaches.”

  George Bush cruises in with “This sucker could go down.”

  We won­der: has a more irre­spons­ible sen­tence been uttered, by any­one, dur­ing this entire crisis?”

• Tricky ques­tions for News­night | The Guard­ian — ’”When Paxman’s there, if there’s a strong editor, and if it is on form, the budget is irrelevant.“Paxman, though, is con­trac­ted for only 100 days a year…’
• We risk los­ing national news bul­let­ins, warns Michael Grade | Media­Guard­ian — Money for news please: “The ITV exec­ut­ive chair­man, Michael Grade has warned that without sup­port for pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing, the net­work could not guar­an­tee the long-term future of sac­rosanct insti­tu­tions such as national news.Grade voiced his con­cerns that national news might ulti­mately not be fin­an­cially viable at a Royal Tele­vi­sion Soci­ety Lon­don con­fer­ence on Friday.”
• Book Review: Crude Con­tin­ent | FT.com — “Clarke…takes issue with the “oil curse” thesis assidu­ously pro­moted by sun­dry envir­on­ment­al­ists, aca­dem­ics, non-governmental organ­isa­tions, the media and African politi­cians: “The evid­ent cor­rup­tion and neg­at­ive ele­ments asso­ci­ated with oil, on which a great deal is writ­ten, are a small part of a wider impact arising from cor­por­ate oil’s port­fo­lio and are less than is pop­ularly imagined.”The most neg­at­ive con­sequences, he says, have less to do with cor­por­ate “malevol­ence” than with Africa’s “medi­ev­al­ism and the flawed polit­ics of its imper­fect states, which do not have the cen­tur­ies of nation­hood behind them … ” The root dilemma, he writes, is in the polit­ical appar­atus, not in the pos­ses­sion of oil wealth, cit­ing Angolan exper­i­ence to val­id­ate his judgments.”
• Book Review: A Most Wanted Man | FT.com — “Not­with­stand­ing that it was mar­keted as a near-documentary reflec­tion of the author’s exper­i­ences as a spy, it was in real­ity a world as styl­ised, self-sufficient and quasi-abstract as that of Tolkien.In ‘A Most Wanted Man’ all the expec­ted but­tons are duti­fully pushed: the mil­len­nial para­noia of European secur­ity ser­vices, the spooky, never quite vis­ible insinu­ation of the Rus­sian mafia, the creep­ing medi­ev­al­isa­tion of west­ern soci­ety, the out­rageous absence of secrecy where extraordin­ary rendi­tion is concerned.

  It felt to me through­out, how­ever, that the job Le Carré was attempt­ing to do is per­formed more thor­oughly and haunt­ingly by invest­ig­at­ive journalism.”

• “Iro­nique et euro­sceptique” | Eng­land Expects — Blog­ger blocked: “I have a formal warn­ing and, if I con­tinue to blog then ‘sanc­tions’ may be applied. Given that the sanc­tions amount to upwards of a four month dock­ing of wages, I really can­not afford to continue.”
• A Weary Titan? | Eco­nomic Prin­cipals — “In 1905 Bri­tain began to cuts its naval and mil­it­ary budgets.  The same year a Gen­eral Staff study ven­tured that an army of 120,000 Brit­ish troops might be suf­fi­cient to check any attemp­ted Ger­man inva­sion of France.  When the war finally came nine years later, the economy-sized force wasn’t nearly suf­fi­cient. It didn’t deter the Ger­mans, nor stop them once they began to march; it was only enough to draw Bri­tain into a pro­trac­ted war, by the end of which, the United King­dom would lose seven times its ante in bat­tle­field cas­u­al­ties alone.  Such are the per­ils of wish­ful thinking.”

Tagged as: Unrequired Reading