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 più’ 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.”