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:

• Lauren Rich Fine: News­pa­pers Should Come To Terms With Lower Margins—Then Go Private | paidContent.org — “[E]ven when there is some form of cyc­lical recov­ery, mar­gins for the industry will be dra­mat­ic­ally lower than they were dur­ing the hey­day. I, for one, just hope they are pos­it­ive as that is good enough for an industry that mat­ters quite a bit bey­ond just its eco­nom­ics. For an industry that well under­stands it serves the greater good, come to terms with lower mar­gins. And then go private!”
• Journ­al­istic fel­la­tio | The Quad City Reporter — “I have to adapt my tac­tics to the people I deal with. And so while I may com­plain about those stor­ies I think of as journ­al­istic fel­la­tio, I’ll keep doing them because it’s worth it to have sources that trust and like me. And that’s the essence of the game. I need to trust my sources to deliver inform­a­tion. But in order for that to hap­pen with any reg­u­lar­ity, I need to give my sources a reason to deliver that inform­a­tion to me. And so I’ll do those happy, sappy stor­ies from time to time. If it means just one juicy bit of inform­a­tion, it’s totally worth it.”
• NYT’s Sulzber­ger: ‘We can’t care’ if news­pa­pers die | CNET — “Now that every­one is in their end-of-the-world mode, we should make a con­scious effort to reject the increas­ingly fren­zied ‘apo­ca­lypse now, tomor­row, and forever’ talk,” he said. “Qual­ity con­tent matters…trustworthy voices are more import­ant than they have ever been… [W]e must be where people want us for our information.”
• Eis­ner On Online Video And What ‘Works’: Sex And Sarah Palin; But ‘Story’ Is The Thing | paidContent.org — “Sex seems to work. User-gen, sports, news, any­thing with Sarah Palin works. At the end of the day, like in all the other indus­tries from movies to TV, long-form, story-driven con­tent is what ulti­mately works. But it’s still in the exper­i­mental stage. At ABC, we star­ted America’s Fun­ni­est Home Video—so this isn’t the first era to watch a man get hit in the groin with a bat. Most of the stu­dio video is repur­posed, like Hulu. It makes NBC and News Corp feel like they’re doing something—I’m not sure it’s the right thing, but they’re doing it well…”
• Did journalism’s busi­ness model dis­tort journalism’s social mis­sion? | OJR — “For some of us, then, the prob­lem may actu­ally be that what we are wor­ried about is sav­ing journ­al­ism. Wrong focus.

  “Take the mis­sion away from journ­al­ism and think more about journ­al­ism as a tool: We care about poverty, and how could we use journ­al­ism as a tool to make a dif­fer­ence,” he said.

  If that sounds like advocacy said Wert­man, it needn’t be. You per­suade your donors (and con­sumers) that a full, fair, bal­anced and pro­por­tional pic­ture of the issue is the best way to get people inter­ested and informed, and thus to bring about action.”

• Fat news­pa­per profits are his­tory | Reflec­tions of a News­o­saur — “Although the eco­nomy will recover in the full­ness of time, there are very real doubts about whether news­pa­pers still have the time, resources and ingenu­ity to migrate to a viable new fin­an­cial model to assure their long-term survival.”
• Why Tra­di­tional Reces­sion Tac­tics Are Doomed To Fail This Time | Umair Haque — “Star­bucks tried to grow by selling us more junk we don’t need — music, mugs, and mouse pads. That was ortho­dox, text­book, industrial-era strategy: grow by seiz­ing share in adja­cent mar­kets. But it’s also defunct in a world where we don’t need more use­less junk.”
• Advert­ising plunge will kill news­pa­pers — and there won’t be a bail­out | Kiy­oshi Mar­tinez — If you fol­low the journ­al­ism industry pub­lic­a­tions and blo­go­sphere, then you’ve prob­ably wit­nessed an industry doing it’s finest fid­dling while Rome burns. Everyone’s talk­ing ad nauseam about the prob­lems with news­pa­pers and the industry.

  Every­one is won­der­ing, “What is killing newspapers?”

  Here’s your answer: “A lack of money.” Yes, it’s really that simple.

• McClatchy Posts a Small Profit as Rev­enue Falls — NYTimes.com — “For the entire third quarter, advert­ising rev­enue fell 19 per­cent. A gain of 9 per­cent in online advert­ising rev­enue could not off­set a nearly 22 per­cent drop in print ads because Inter­net ads made up only 12 per­cent of over­all advert­ising revenue.

  Cir­cu­la­tion rev­enue dropped 4.9 percent.”