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 Idea | Inter­na­tional Quarterly — “We want to know bet­ter, and we want you to be involved. INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY will be pub­lished for a gen­eral audi­ence, but it will have at its heart a club of sup­port­ers – indi­vidu­als and busi­nesses – who will gain access to our writers and subjects.

  We want to build a bridge between the best inter­na­tional writers, broad­casters and thinkers, and those who are most curi­ous about the world. We pro­pose that the two sides should meet and make things better.”

• WAN: Tra­di­tional media has five years growth left | Press Gaz­ette — “The over-50s are help­ing to sus­tain tra­di­tional media, and also in many of the emer­ging mar­kets there is still plenty of room for tra­di­tional media. The death of tra­di­tional media is exag­ger­ated, at least in a five-year context.”
• When Do Immig­rants Learn Eng­lish? Likely, not when you think | Greg Laden’s Blog — “Ger­man con­tin­ued to be the primary lan­guage in numer­ous Wis­con­sin com­munit­ies, and some second– and third-generation des­cend­ants of immig­rants were still mono­lin­gual as adults. Under­stand­ing this his­tory can help inform con­tem­por­ary debates about lan­guage and immig­ra­tion and help dis­mantle the myth that suc­cess­ful immig­rant groups of yes­ter­day owed their prosper­ity to an imme­di­ate, vol­un­tary shift to English.”
• The wrong scape­goats | Peter Wilby — “Why do papers that have mil­lions of read­ers on mod­est incomes get more enraged about poor people receiv­ing state help than about bankers pulling in annual bonuses that exceed, many times over, what their read­ers earn in a lifetime?

  The proper Marx­ist answer is that the corporate-owned press and its lick­spittle journ­al­ists are try­ing to dir­ect the work­ers’ anger away from the bour­geoisie towards mem­bers of their own class. The depress­ing truth, how­ever, is that news­pa­pers are giv­ing read­ers what they want.”

• John Simpson on TV News | The Guard­ian — “The BBC will have money taken away from it. You’ll just see more and more stor­ies not get­ting repor­ted. We’ll be back to Sky News and ITN levels where there isn’t enough money to cover cer­tain stor­ies and take a risk or two.”
• Paid-for-free papers: the mirage of the hybrid mod­els | Monday Note — “[W]e know that the “one-size-fits-all” doesn’t work in the media sec­tor — espe­cially as audi­ences become increas­ingly seg­men­ted). At least it won’t fly without a major product adapt­a­tion and segmentation.”