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:

• Pre­dic­tion Mar­kets Fail Again | Barry Ritholtz — Go fig­ure: Pre­dic­tion mar­kets — those thinly traded games played by col­lege kids and other traders  who lack the cap­ital to trade in deeper broader mar­kets (equit­ies, fixed income, com­mod­it­ies, cur­ren­cies) — are for shit.”
• The view from the lab: The com­fort of pat­terns | Tele­graph — “Man is the pattern-seeking animal, so much so that he finds order even when it is not there. Books that claim that pets bark just before their own­ers come home, or that think­ing about a friend makes that friend more likely to call, sell mil­lions. The world has more astro­lo­gers than astro­nomers — and devotees of the former are much more likely than aver­age to see shapes, fig­ures and mes­sages when given a piece of paper covered in ran­dom dots.”
• Who Is Watch­ing Tele­vi­sion? | TV Board — “[T]he truth is the industry propag­ates the count­ing myth. We let sellers get away with post­ing to ter­ribly poor data and turn up our noses at soph­ist­ic­ated (albeit not fully baked) data solu­tions from Google, TNS and Rentrak.

  At the end of the day, count­ing is usu­ally bet­ter than polling. When data from broad­band video is avail­able, even when it is broken into five or ten minute streams, those “tuners” are coun­ted. When Live+ num­bers are crunched, those “view­ers” are estim­ated, and I would argue that the estim­ate is more like a SWAG. If the tele­vi­sion industry is to thrive, meas­ure­ment is essen­tial. But poor meas­ure­ment is worse than no meas­ure­ment at all. Just ask the radio guys.”

• How anom­al­ous is Ber­lusconi? | Chris Han­retty — Ber­lusconi can be (and has been) com­pared to other media enter­pren­eurs who have entered polit­ics, such as Ross Perot or Thaksin Shinawatra (Cam­pus 2006, pp. 165–166, Caniglia 2000), though Ber­lusconi has been far more suc­cess­ful than either of these.

  Ber­lusconi is not even the only Italian politi­cian to own a tele­vi­sion com­pany: for a time Vit­torio Cec­chi Gori (son of the film pro­du­cer Mario Cec­chi Gori) was both a Sen­ator for the Partito Popolare Itali­ano and owner of Telemontecarlo.

• Those BBC ‘leaks’ | FT.com — “The insinu­ation is that he is some­how being used by people in the gov­ern­ment and the City, where he is known to have good contacts.

  If there were leaks that breached reg­u­lat­ory rules then, by all means, invest­ig­ate the leak­ers, espe­cially if any­one leak­ing is found to have profited from it.”

• Yahoo/Newspapers Boost Ad Pact Eco­nomy A Chal­lenge Web portal and nearly 800 papers team up in selling ads to local firms | Con­tent Agenda — “Yahoo gets most of its rev­enue from dis­play ad sales. It’s count­ing on its news­pa­per con­sor­tium to help boost its ad rev­enue and bet­ter com­pete with such rivals as Google.”