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 Rosenbaum-Jarvis smack­down | John McQuaid — “[I]s there a risk that if you focus on tech­no­logy and the chan­ging rela­tion­ship between the journ­al­ist and the news con­sumer, the fun­da­ment­als get lost in the shuffle? This is a prob­lem at many news­pa­pers, which in their relent­less race to cut back and innov­ate sim­ul­tan­eously are lit­er­ally trad­ing journ­al­ism tal­ent and exper­i­ence for tech­nical expertise.

  The focus on tech­no­logy, form, and social net­work­ing is a big part of the puzzle. But con­tent should be given its due.”

• Does Local TV Have A Future? | Diane Mer­mi­gas — “Local TV sta­tion own­ers (many of them heav­ily in debt) are under pres­sure to modify high-cost leg­acy struc­ture, lever­age their unique local con­tent and con­nec­tions, and engage in new digital enter­prises to col­lect­ively off­set tra­di­tional ad declines. That means reach­ing bey­ond cash retrans fees from cable and telco oper­at­ors to link­ing their local fran­chise brands with con­sumer elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ers like Apple, GPS oper­at­ors, wire­less mobile tele­phone and PDA man­u­fac­tur­ers (like RIMM).”
• Alan Rus­bridger: Local papers are vital — and must be saved | The Guard­ian — Is there any reason why local news­pa­pers — whether in print, on broad­band or broad­cast — shouldn’t com­pete with the broad­casters for some form of sub­sidy in return for provid­ing the pub­lic ser­vice of keep­ing a com­munity informed about itself?

  If you had asked that ques­tion a year or two ago most edit­ors and own­ers would have been united in dis­miss­ing it out of hand. They would have argued that the press in Bri­tain has been free of any kind of state sub­sidy for the best part of 200 years or more. They would have swiftly rejec­ted the kind of reg­u­lat­ory strings that might be attached to a require­ment to pro­duce so-called pub­lic ser­vice content.

  But now?

• Quantum of Solace | Vir­tual Eco­nom­ics — “[T]hey’ve essen­tially recast Bond not as the myth­ical secret agent hero of the old 60s and 70s clas­sics but as a sociopathic serial-killer who merely hap­pens to be pro­tec­ted from the con­sequences of his murders by the license of his morally-bankrupt government.”
• Why truth is in stor­ies | Andreas Kluth — Isa­bel Allende: “‘I think that’s why I’m a storyteller. I take all these dis­par­ate events and I have to con­nect them. I have to make them seem inev­it­able and yet sur­pris­ing and plaus­ible. That’s what I think life is like, too. I have the lux­ury to do exactly what it is we all need time to do, and that is just think about the mys­tery of life.‘

  And how sim­ilar to a less poetic author, Dan McAdams, a psy­cho­logy pro­fessor at North­west­ern who has:

  ‘a life-story the­ory of iden­tity, which argues that mod­ern adults provide their lives with a sense of unity and pur­pose by con­struct­ing and refin­ing self-defining life stor­ies or “per­sonal myths.”’

• Max Mos­ley: My sex life is of interest to no one but this squalid industry | Com­ment is free — “To expose in a news­pa­per the most private ele­ments of someone’s per­sonal life is to impose on them and their fam­ily a ter­rible pen­alty. No civ­il­ised com­munity should do this without very good reason. The lower reaches of the tabloid press have shown them­selves wholly indif­fer­ent to the suf­fer­ing they cause their vic­tims and their vic­tims’ entirely inno­cent fam­il­ies. The courts can ensure that no one is made to suf­fer in this way unless the pub­lic interest truly requires it. No tabloid editor can be trus­ted to do so.”
• Is Jeff Jar­vis gloat­ing about the death of print? | Ron Rosen­baum — Slate — “Look, there’s noth­ing wrong with Jar­vis doing all this think­ing and decree­ing. He’s said some savvy, if unori­ginal, things about journ­al­ism (advoc­at­ing look­ing at the art­icle as an ongo­ing pro­cess, not a product, for instance). He’s among the most rational of the new thinkers. But it’s the cal­lous con­tempt for work­ing journ­al­ists that grates. It’s a con­tempt for the beau­ti­ful losers who actu­ally made journ­al­ism an hon­or­able pro­fes­sion for a brief shin­ing moment—well, longer than that—before it became a plat­form for “reverse engineering.”