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:

• Stuff White People Like: Journ­al­ism? | The Edit­or­i­al­iste — “Star­bucks plays music heard on The Wire, which gets writ­ten about in Slate, which has an agree­ment with NPR, which reviews books avail­able in Bor­ders, which sells cof­fee and expens­ive sandwiches.”
• The Magazine Industry’s Crisis of Con­science — “At a time when the best com­edy and the best drama on TV (that would be 30 Rock and Mad Men, respect­ively) make no secret of their will­ing­ness to write spon­sors into their scripts, it’s hard to argue that let­ting ad dol­lars influ­ence con­tent is an abso­lute evil.”
• Craig’s List had NOTHING to do with a decline in clas­si­fied ad rev­enue | Insti­tute for Ana­lytic Journ­al­ism — “[T]he big change that pushed clas­si­fied ad volume up in the 90s was employ­ment advert­ising. Damn right. The coun­try added 30 mil­lion new jobs in that period, and the num­ber of new people enter­ing the work­force declined because births had declined in the mid-1970s. More com­pet­i­tion for bod­ies = more advert­ising needed.

  Knock out the employ­ment data and everything else stayed steady or INCREASED for news­pa­per classified.”

• News­pa­pers Jet­tis­on­ing Top Tal­ent to Cut Costs | NYTimes.com — “Hav­ing missed the implic­a­tions of the Web and allowed both their con­tent and their audi­ence to be scraped away by aggreg­at­ors and ad net­works, news­pa­pers are now work­ing furi­ously to main­tain audi­ence, build new ad mod­els and ren­ov­ate present­a­tion. But they won’t stay rel­ev­ant to read­ers with gen­eric con­tent ginned up by new­bies with no back­ground in the com­munit­ies they serve.”
• Not Dead: The Paid-for Online Model | Monday­Note — “All busi­ness mod­els built on advert­ising are now in grave peril.

  Take Face­book. 100m users, most of them act­ive, a tril­lion page views per year, about two hours spent per month and per user. 300k images are uploaded every second, cre­at­ing by far the biggest photo lib­rary in the world with more than 10bn images, 4 x Flickr’s.

  Under the sur­face (the huge part of the ice­berg, expenses), num­bers are equally stag­ger­ing:
  - 13k serv­ers were run­ning few months ago, and ana­lysts say the com­pany will need 50k next year.
  - $1m monthly elec­tri­city bill
  - another $500k per month for band­width
  - 2TBs of data (mostly pho­tos) uploaded every day require the pur­chase of one Net­App 3070 each week
  – main­tain­ing this infra­struc­ture requires a big staff, cost­ing about $80m a year.

  In other words, Face­book is burn­ing cash. What about the coal? A shrink­ing sup­ply of ads, ignor­ance of the tar­get group (how often do you click on a ban­ner?) As a res­ult, the fin­an­cial com­munity keeps rais­ing questions.”

• There’s no escape from Geor­gina Downs, the poisoned ‘Pesti­cide Nun’ | Times Online — “Junior min­is­ters were gen­er­ally sup­port­ive of Downs’s cam­paign, but get­ting policy changed required the sup­port of the envir­on­ment sec­ret­ary. So she approached David Miliband, now the for­eign sec­ret­ary. “He turned me down twice in writ­ing, so I went to a con­fer­ence and got him com­ing out of the loo. I told him my name and said he’d refused to meet me twice and I wanted to know why.

  “At first he looked con­fused but the third time I asked, he said, ‘Geor­gina, if there was a reason to meet you, I would have met you’ — or words to that effect. He was very arrogant.”

  She had no greater suc­cess with Hil­ary Benn, the cur­rent sec­ret­ary of state.”