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:

• Remem­ber this day | Dad­b­log — The awful stuff com­ing out of Mum­bai is one thing, but here’s another: the Indian gov­ern­ment ask­ing for live Twit­ter updates to cease to pro­tect their oper­a­tions. For all sorts of reas­ons, this seems to be significant.
• Mum­bai ter­ror­ist attacks show that search engines still can’t get break­ing news right | curry­bet — “We are used to hear­ing that search engines are one of the primary routes that people find news on the net, but I’ve just been hav­ing a scout around the three major search engines as news of the ter­ror­ist attack in Mum­bai unfolds, and I have to say that they are not per­form­ing very well.”
• Death watch: tan­gible media | JD Lasica — “The big takeaway from the dot­com melt­down of 2001–2002 is this: The public’s habits change slooooooowly. We haven’t aban­doned Tar­get and Macy’s and Toys R Us to do all our shop­ping online. But we are buy­ing more of our stuff there. The same will hold true for tan­gible media. We’re at the start of a trans­ition to the digital world, but it will be slow and, for many com­pan­ies, painful.”
• The fin­an­cial melt­down is an aca­demic crisis too | vox — “What we have wit­nessed in recent months is not only the frac­tur­ing of the world’s fin­an­cial sys­tem but the dis­cred­it­ing of an aca­demic dis­cip­line. There are some 4,000 uni­ver­sity fin­ance pro­fess­ors world­wide, thou­sands of fin­ance research papers are pub­lished each year, and yet there have been few if any warn­ings from the aca­demic com­munity of the incen­di­ary poten­tial of global fin­an­cial mar­kets. Is it too harsh to con­clude that des­pite the con­sid­er­able aca­demic resources that go into fin­ance research our under­stand­ing of the beha­viour of fin­an­cial mar­kets is no greater than it was in 1929/33 or indeed 1720?”
• B-grade man­agers and on-line trash: Oz media at work | Crikey — “Ivor Ries, head of research for EL&C Bail­lieu Stock­brok­ing, and former Chanticleer colum­nist with the Aus­tralian Fin­an­cial Review pre­dicted that the latest round of redund­an­cies will be far from the last at Fair­fax. “They will keep cut­ting and keep cut­ting until they dis­ap­pear up their own a-sehole.“

  And earlier he said: “Most of the major media com­pan­ies are incom­pet­ent in mak­ing the trans­ition” to new media. They had assigned “the B team” to their online pro­duc­tions and where “nowhere near exploit­ing their con­tent properly.”

  He went on: “Most of the media organ­isa­tions in Aus­tralia have B and C grade man­agers. They are not good businesspeople.”

  As for Fairfax’s strategy of hav­ing a “tabloid” char­ac­ter online and a “qual­ity” char­ac­ter in print form: “They’re try­ing to talk to advert­isers and say that they are talk­ing to all these BMW drivers, and then they have all this poor white trash con­tent online.”

• Bail Me Out, Mr. Paulson | PJ O’Rourke — “We print journ­al­ists are vic­tims of eco­nomic forces bey­ond our con­trol. We were as sur­prised as every­one else was by the sud­den col­lapse of the reli­able report­ing mar­ket. We had no idea that real news and clear-eyed ana­lysis were being “bundled” with subprime celebrity gos­sip, US Weekly deriv­at­ives, and Jen­nifer Aniston/Angelina Jolie swaps. We need a swift infu­sion of fed­eral aid. Oth­er­wise all the inform­a­tion in Amer­ica will be about Lind­say Lohan’s sex life.”
• Al Jazeera’s cit­izen journ­al­ism pro­ject | yelvington.com — “Mohamed Nanabhay’s new-media crew at Al Jaz­eera, the Qatar-based Arabic satel­lite TV net­work, has launched a citizen-journalism upload portal, seek­ing eye­wit­ness news reports from its vast inter­na­tional audience.”
• Scope, Com­plete­ness, and Accur­acy of Drug Inform­a­tion in Wiki­pe­dia (Decem­ber) — Clauson et al., 10.1345/aph.1L474 | The Annals of Phar­ma­co­ther­apy — RESULTS: Wiki­pe­dia was able to answer sig­ni­fic­antly fewer drug inform­a­tion ques­tions (40.0%) com­pared with MDR (82.5%; p < 0.001). Wiki­pe­dia per­formed poorly regard­ing inform­a­tion on dos­ing, with a score of 0% versus the MDR score of 90.0%. Answers found in Wiki­pe­dia were 76.0% com­plete, while MDR provided answers that were 95.5% com­plete; over­all, Wiki­pe­dia answers were less com­plete than those in Med­scape (p < 0.001). No fac­tual errors were found in Wiki­pe­dia, whereas 4 answers in Med­scape con­flic­ted with the answer key; errors of omis­sion were higher in Wiki­pe­dia (n = 48) than in MDR (n = 14). There was a marked improve­ment in Wiki­pe­dia over time, as cur­rent entries were super­ior to those 90 days prior (p = 0.024).

  CONCLUSIONS: Wiki­pe­dia has a more nar­row scope, is less com­plete, and has more errors of omis­sion than the com­par­ator data­base. Wiki­pe­dia may be a use­ful point of engage­ment for con­sumers, but is not author­it­at­ive and should only be a sup­ple­mental source of drug informat

• The strange decline of The Eco­nom­ist | Dad­b­log — “Increas­ingly, The Eco­nom­ist resembles a very high-end ver­sion of The Week — a com­pen­dium of inter­na­tional news aimed at the inter­na­tional trav­el­ler with little time for the detail and an hour in the air­port to fill. This may be suf­fi­cient for the non-executive chair­man who doesn’t really need to, you know, under­stand stuff. For the rest of us, Robert Peston’s blog has got more meat on it than the Eco­nom­ist. Oh dear.”