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 YouTube election [Don’t Be Evil] | Valleywag – "Google helps politicians reach young voters on YouTube and hosts their videos for free. YouTube benefits from the free content and the traffic political videos generate; even if it doesn't sell ads directly on the pages, it's estimated that it could make $1 billion a year on search ads — and in that business, merely cementing YouTube's traffic lead helps Google make money.

  In that light, isn't there something that stinks about handing the president's weekly addresses to a single commercial outlet controlled by a political ally of the president? Obama's YouTube chats amount to a large, unspoken, behind-the-scenes government kickback. Every election has something dirty about it. And there's no question Google won this contest."

• Afghanistan: Fonti, giornalista NYT rapito e’ nelle mani di Haqqani | AKI – Sarebbe nelle mani dei miliziani di Siraj Haqqani, uno dei piu' attivi comandanti talebani nell'est dell'Afghanistan, il giornalista David Rohde, corrispondente del New York Times e' stato rapito insieme a due afghani nella provincia di Logar, una sessantina di chilometri a sud di Kabul: lo riferiscono ad AKI fonti di Kabul.
• Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism Business? | PBS – "I never try to sell Spot.us as a silver bullet that will support a whole news organization," Cohn said. "But I do see it helping a news organization so they can do something beyond their regular means. They can strive for excellence, but it won't support day-to-day reporting. It has its limitations…Community-funded journalism relies on two basic shifts. First, the audience has to think of journalism as a public good like art that's worth sustaining with their own money. The second shift is with reporters who have to realize they are a personal brand and they can pitch the public."
• Ron Rosenbaum trashes media consultant who tells print journalists to pull up their socks | News Bites – "For me, I wished Rosenbaum hadn't dragged the Reader into his peroration. He wrote this:

  "Yes, by Jeff Jarvis' logic, the hardworking reporters now on the street were fools: They didn't spend their time figuring out how to multiplatform themselves. I think of that guy John Conroy, who wrote about police torture for years for the Chicago Reader, which is now bankrupt and had to let Conroy go just as—after years and years—Conroy's reporting (100,000 words!) on the subject was vindicated and an official investigation began at last. Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work or the media consultants who mock them?"

  Conroy's my friend, and if I thought for a second that Jarvis was mocking him, I'd pound him harder than Rosenbaum could ever dream. As it is, I resent Rosenbaum's invoking him to gild a tinny argument."

• Hannah’s Unsustainable Business Model For Journalism | an immedia reaction – "In my ideal and probably unworkable business model for journalism, people would pay a financially viable amount for a year’s worth of news, without adverts, and the world’s journalists would publish stories as and when things actually happened, rather than scurrying 24/7 to generate copy from sometimes what are complete non-stories. If the subscription were large enough, journalists might even work harder over sustained lengths of time to find really good stories… who knows?

  I originally assumed this idea was completely unworkable… imagine subscribing to a magazine and receiving it on a random basis. A one week gap. A one month gap. A two day gap. But regular production is an attempt to impose an order on a something that is not uniform and never will be. And when you publish less-than-brilliant stories, to fill the gaps between the good stories, people do notice."

• “We can’t find any impact from the redesign” | Jeff Mignon – "While I think that is necessary to rethink newspapers – editorial strategy AND visual strategy – on a regular basis, I have been saying that redesigns are now a days, and at minimum, a waste of money.

  The main illusion is to believe that shorter articles, bigger photos, colors all over, informational graphics, format change and new fonts are going to attract new readers, especially young readers.

  Not only do the vast majority of those new designs not attract young readers but they also alienate some of the most loyal customers, the 55+."

• 10 Things Every Newspaper And Magazine Website Must Do | Six Pixels of Separation – "Turn those long articles into checklists or break up the content. Use bold to create headers throughout the piece. Highlight the important lines. Italicize the quotes. Reading online is not like reading a newspaper. Make the copy bounce online by adding in simple and effective formatting techniques to make the content "pop" more. Remember, reading online is more like snackable content."
• Media has ‘misleading ethical code’, says Evan Davis | Journalism.co.uk – "News organisations get a story and have to make it sound better than it is. And a lot of people involved in communications would say this is sheer professionalism and it's what you should do," said Davis.

  "But is this right? Are we really doing ourselves a favour by doing this?"

  'Thou shalt not lie' is journalism's ethical code, which gets extended to 'thereafter you can mislead people as far as you possibly can', he said.

  "We're all aware of this ethical code, but it's not sufficiently restrictive," Davis said.

  The problem with misleading and dishonest reporting isn't that it's unethical, it's that it's unintelligent, he said.

• Rory Peck Awards finalist: BBC owes news freelancers proper credit | The Guardian – "Our lonely style of journalism and our disproportionately spilt blood have not earned us the place we so badly wanted in our profession. We failed, and the reason that we failed is that however hard we tried we could never get credited for our work. As every photojournalist knows too well, without recognition you can't build a successful career.

  "I have been shot more times than I have been credited by the BBC. In fact, I was shot once while filming with the BBC. The shooting, of course, made up a significant part of the news report, I was referred to as our cameraman, as if I was some damaged bit of equipment."

• A Bailout Plan For U.S. Newspapers | BusinessWeek – "Unlike with banks, the collapse of American newspapers does not endanger the world's financial system. Unlike car companies, the newspaper industry does not lose billions of dollars each month. No matter. We can position this as a proactive move to save the only industry prominently mentioned in the Bill of Rights."
• CNN’s New Wire Will Shake Up the Newspaper Business – Seeking Alpha – "Talk to web managers across the country, and they don't tell you they want more national and international news. What they want is "back of the book" features content, the kind of content that advertisers want to advertise against and for which they will pay higher rates. Newspapers produce a dearth of it; CNN produces more. Not surprisingly, both AP and Reuters have made a point of creating more niche features content in the past couple of years for the same reason."
• James Murdoch: Large Acquisitions Possible But Timing Is Everything | paidContent – "The newspaper industry has spent so much time wringing its hands about things that are exogenous and not enough time thinking about customers' daily lives." Instead, consider the possibilities for innovation like the way the Sunday Times is promoting non-print businesses or ways to play into the economy like the Sun working with retailers to display price cuts. Murdoch called the Sun the UK's largest short-break holiday company and said it is making tens of millions of pounds a year from its online bingo game.  But he also talked about looking for cost cutting as advertising declines."