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:

• A journ­al­ist out­side of j-school | Megan Taylor — “I gradu­ated from the Uni­ver­sity of Flor­ida 5 months ago, and it took this long to real­ize that while I brag that everything I know comes to me from Google Reader and Twit­ter, I knew a lot more when I was sur­roun­ded by other journalists.

  I knew who the badass journ­al­ists were, I knew when and where the awe­some con­fer­ences were and I knew where to turn for any other inform­a­tion I didn’t have at my fingertips.

  Now I’m 1,000 miles away from that net­work. I don’t know any­body here, I don’t know where to look for all the things I used to know.”

• Journ­al­ism train­ing bod­ies agree to work together | Press Gaz­ette — “The launch of the new Joint Journ­al­ism Train­ing Coun­cil was announced at the Soci­ety of Edit­ors con­fer­ence in Bris­tol this week. It will be chaired by Sky News online asso­ci­ate editor Simon Bucks, the Society’s out­go­ing president.”
• Future of News | Sac­red­Facts — “There’s just that troub­ling issue of how we get an audi­ence and advert­isers to pay for it. News­pa­pers and broad­casters have lived for dec­ades by selling audi­ences to advert­isers. Now the num­ber of eye­balls per page or per pro­gramme is fall­ing — but we have much greater detail and gran­u­lar­ity about where they are going and what they are doing online.  Media organ­isa­tions have to find a way to extract the com­mer­cial value from that. 

  The risk oth­er­wise is that  long stand­ing news­pa­pers or sta­tions will disappear.”

• Per­sonal Walled Gar­dens | The Digital Journ­al­ist — “The world of per­sonal walled gar­dens demands our atten­tion and our study. Inform­a­tion wid­gets are a way to make our con­tent avail­able, so we des­per­ately need to be in the wid­get busi­ness. The Weather Chan­nel has a remark­able radar wid­get that I use on my iGoogle page. ESPN offers my sports news. I get enter­tain­ment news from E! Take the time to per­use the wid­get gal­lery that Google offers (they call them “gad­gets”) for per­sonal pages with a single mouse click. Search “local news,” and you’ll find a host of local media com­pan­ies mak­ing RSS feeds avail­able via widget.

  But such wid­gets are just a small corner of what’s pos­sible, if we only have eyes to see. Tra­di­tional media is brand-obsessed, and, to a cer­tain extent, jus­ti­fi­ably so, but our brands can also blind us to pos­sib­il­it­ies that oth­ers — mostly out­siders — can eas­ily see. The mis­sion is to make money and to do it in ways that make sense, whether asso­ci­ated with con­tent we cre­ate, aggreg­ate, or organize.”

• ProPublica’s Gold­man Sachs Hatchet Job | Seek­ing Alpha — “ProP­ub­lica is a non-profit investigative-journalism shop foun­ded by Paul Steiger, the former man­aging editor of The Wall Street Journal. So you’d expect that when it moves into the world of fin­ance, dur­ing a credit crisis which has thrown up its fair share of scan­dals, it would pro­duce some­thing really good.

  Instead, it’s pro­duced some­thing really bad: a non-story about Goldman’s sell-side research on munis, lar­ded gen­er­ously with ridicu­lous over­reach and, nat­ur­ally, a gen­er­ous pinch of CDS demon­iz­a­tion. Today, the story leads in the LA Times.”

• Spot.us — Dave Cohn’s innov­at­ive attempt at fund­ing journ­al­ism direct.