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:

• Why We Pub­lished That Steve Jobs Heart Attack Report | Sil­icon Val­ley Insider — “Unlike main­stream media organ­iz­a­tions, we do not view our role as one-to-many media “gate­keep­ers.” Rather, we view ourselves as full-time mem­bers of the tech community–engaged in gath­er­ing, dis­cuss­ing, ana­lyz­ing, and present­ing inform­a­tion that we believe is rel­ev­ant to the com­munity at large.

  Some­times this inform­a­tion is fact. Some­times it is rumor or scut­tle­butt. Some­times it is spec­u­la­tion. Always it is inform­a­tion that we believe is cred­ible or inter­est­ing enough to bring to our read­ers’ attention.”

• Don’t just read the news — play the news | Haaretz — “Olmert’s Inter­rog­a­tion is only one of the many games pos­ted on playthenewsgame.com, a unique Web site where news events are presen­ted and ana­lyzed via inter­act­ive games. At the end of each game, the player must decide two things: what he thinks should be done and what he thinks will actu­ally hap­pen in real­ity. The opin­ions and fore­casts are then col­lec­ted and turn into a kind of pub­lic opin­ion sur­vey. The player also has to fol­low the news and see if his fore­cast mater­i­al­izes in the real world.”
• Accur­acy in Indian crime report­ing | The Hoot — “We wish to under­line that accur­acy in report­ing facts is the first respons­ib­il­ity of the media. Where facts are dis­puted, the dis­crep­an­cies should be poin­ted out and the sources ques­tioned. Present­ing sev­eral ver­sions of incid­ents and using mul­tiple sources of inform­a­tion is an inali­en­able part of cred­ible report­ing.
   
  We also emphas­ise that uncov­er­ing the truth may not always be the job of the media. The media is not equipped to invest­ig­ate and uncover the truth in severely com­plic­ated cases like the incid­ent being examined in the report.
   
  But present­ing dif­fer­ent facets of events as they emerge is part of the pro­fes­sional respons­ib­il­ity of the media.”
• Fin­an­cial inform­a­tion firms brace for squeeze | Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tribune — “[M]any ana­lysts are pre­dict­ing Bloomberg will be hit even harder by the mass fin­an­cial job cuts because it relies on data ter­minal sales for the vast major­ity of its business.

  Since Bloomberg is not a pub­lic com­pany, it doesn’t dis­close rev­enue fig­ures, but the group cur­rently has around 290,000 ter­min­als glob­ally — up from 274,000 at the end of 2007 — and charges as much as 20 times what Thom­son Reu­ters does per ter­minal because Bloomberg’s offer­ing is all-or-nothing, whereas Thom­son allows the pur­chase of small à la carte data services…

  Just the col­lapse of Leh­man will res­ult in a loss to Bloomberg of as many as 4,000 ter­min­als, estim­ate ana­lysts — that’s around US$72 mil­lion worth of revenue.”

• Gan­nett bor­rows extra $1.2bn | FT.com — “Gan­nett has drawn down $1.2bn of its bor­row­ing facil­it­ies, the pub­lisher of USA Today announced on Fri­day night, demon­strat­ing the grow­ing rush by busi­nesses to lock in fund­ing as com­mer­cial paper mar­kets shut down around them.”
• Wall Street Journal Lays Off More Online Staffers | Busi­nes­s­Week — “News Corp’s Wall Street Journal today let go of at least two online staffers, insiders report. They are Cybele Weis­ser, the per­sonal fin­ance editor, and Laura Lorber, its small busi­ness editor.”