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:

• Lyons under fire from regional press | Holdthefrontpage.co.uk — They have a point: “Sir Michael leads the body that will decide whether the plans go ahead. He should not be com­ment­ing on these issues dur­ing the pro­cess and effect­ively pre-judging it.”
• NY Times’ Andrew Rosenthal: “Inform­a­tion Isn’t Free” | Busi­nes­s­Week — “[H]ow could you pos­sibly start char­ging people to read the nytimes.com now?

  “Maybe ten years ago we [as in, many news­pa­pers and other con­tent sites] could have done some­thing — held hands and jumped off the cliff together.

  We didn’t.

  It’s the biggest mis­take we ever made.”

• Dan Rather on the Even­ing News | Jeff Ber­cov­ici — Dan pre­dicts demise of CBS Even­ing News: “I would not be sur­prised to see one or more of the major over-the-airways net­works do away with even­ing news as we know it. Hav­ing said that I believe someone, at least some one, will stay in that business.”
• Al Jaz­eera pays price for tribunal vic­tory | Roy Greenslade — “Al Jazeera’s argu­ment — which pre­vailed as far as the tribunal was con­cerned — got much less space with smal­ler headlines.

  For the record, its point was that journ­al­istic staff felt Burgin’s mana­gerial style was harm­fully affected by her being Clark’s wife. As a res­ult she was offered a role in a dif­fer­ent depart­ment, but refused to accept it.”

• News Corp. Annual Meet­ing: Ques­tions About Bail­outs; A Deal With Red­stone? Mur­doch: No, And No | paidContent.org — “News­pa­pers in Aus­tralia and Eng­land news­pa­pers are doing well. Mur­doch noted that that things don’t look so well for most oth­ers. That said, the mer­ger with Dow Jones has con­trib­uted to News Corp. and that company’s prop­er­ties mutu­ally. ‘Since Dow Jones was acquired by News Corp., WSJ.com’s audi­ence has surged 90 per­cent. We con­tinue to believe that a sub­scrip­tion wall is the surest path to grow­ing rev­en­ues at WSJ.com.’”
• Where did Nor­we­gian suc­cess of VG come from? | forum4editors — Minor mar­ket dom­in­a­tion sounds like a con­vin­cing explan­a­tion to that ques­tion but here’s their mis­sion state­ment: “VG’s plan is no more to be the best read news­pa­per in the coun­try — it wants to be the lead­ing news out­let in Nor­way. So far so good — VG is way ahead of its com­pet­it­ors with 3 milion unique users and 335 mil­lion page views weekly.”