Unrequired Reading {31.10.08}

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 BBC’s lead­er­ship went AWOL this week | Greg Dyke — Times Online — “The Burns com­mit­tee came up with the per­fectly sens­ible sug­ges­tion that there should be a small out­side reg­u­lator, “Ofbeeb”, to reg­u­late the BBC and a board of gov­ernors respons­ible for run­ning it. Each would have its own chair­man. The trouble was that the Chair­man of the BBC at the time, Michael Grade, hated Lord Burns’s pro­posed struc­ture — he would cer­tainly have lost some power — and threatened to resign if the pro­posal were imple­men­ted, which is ironic given that he resigned any­way a year or so later in the for­lorn hope that he’d make his for­tune at ITV. Hav­ing lost one BBC Chair­man in 2004 after the Hut­ton inquiry, Ms Jow­ell decided she couldn’t face los­ing another just a year later, so instead the cur­rent reg­u­lat­ory sys­tem was born, a sys­tem that even inside the depart­ment they admit was a fudge.”
• Islamic Blog­gers Con­front Muslim Broth­er­hood on Egypt Polit­ics | Bloomberg — The Muslim Broth­er­hood grapples with ‘the con­ver­sa­tion’: “The Broth­er­hood acknow­ledges that blog­ging has cre­ated a divi­sion of opin­ion in the organ­iz­a­tion. Abdel Moneim Aly El– Bar­bary, a phys­i­cian and high offi­cial, mon­it­ors the blog­gers and estim­ates their num­ber at about 150. He says he belongs to the fac­tion that sup­ports them; still, he wants them to avoid attack­ing per­son­al­it­ies, be polite and keep their cri­tiques positive.”
• The Revolu­tion Theme Goes Open Source | DailyB­lo­g­Tips — Revolu­tion is now free…
• Major­ity of Allegheny pros­ti­tutes are on the Demo­cratic side | Pitt­s­burgh Tribune-Review — “John McCain and Barack Obama, if you’re woo­ing a pop­u­la­tion of registered voters who are young, female and drawn to men in suits, then Allegheny County has 675 ladies ready to pull your lever.

  They’re con­victed street­walk­ers, escorts and brothel babes collared in 2000 and from 2003–2006, uncovered by the Trib.

  Based on the pros­ti­tutes’ voter regis­tra­tion cards, they’re destined to become Obama girls in Novem­ber. That’s because 78 per­cent of them registered as Demo­crats. County­wide, Dems make up only about 62 per­cent of voters, accord­ing to the Divi­sion of Elections.”

• Armaged­don for news­pa­pers? Don’t bet on it | Richard Sik­los — “[T]he great pub­lish­ing blo­wout is not yet over. And the gigantic risk in all this is that short­sighted cut­backs dimin­ish the rel­ev­ance of some pub­lic­a­tions bey­ond repair. But someone is going to make a lot of money call­ing the bot­tom on this one – and the rest will very likely read all about it in one form or another of print.”
• Wolff opines on Mur­doch again | Medi­afile — “Q: Was buy­ing the [Wall Street] Journal a mistake?

  A: I don’t think it’s a mis­take for Rupert. I think it’s actu­ally the crown­ing glory for Rupert. Is it a busi­ness mis­take? Of course it’s a busi­ness mis­take. It’s a newspaper!”

Tagged as: Unrequired Reading