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:

• Change We /Would/ Believe In | Eco­nomic Prin­cipals — A really good stim­u­lus pack­age would take aim at curb­ing America’s con­tri­bu­tion to cli­mate change – treat­ing the prob­lem not as a cer­tainty, but as a prob­ab­il­ity, deserving of a rel­at­ively inex­pens­ive insur­ance policy, pending fur­ther devel­op­ments.  Its center­piece would be a car­bon tax, phased in by degrees start­ing in 2011, just as eco­nomic recov­ery is expec­ted to begin.
   
  The vast sums to be spent by the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment in the next two years – as much as $500 bil­lion in both 2009 and 2010 – should be framed mainly in terms of fin­an­cing the trans­ition to a new set of long-range national goals rather than as short-term Keyne­sian stim­u­lus.
   
  That would mean smal­ler cars, tighter win­dows, bet­ter fur­naces, new hous­ing and plenty of improve­ments of the pub­lic infra­struc­ture as well, start­ing with health care – a couple of years of intense pre­par­a­tion for the change.  It would mean, too, an imme­di­ate major com­mit­ment to higher edu­ca­tion, on the order of the 1958 National Defense Educati
• THE FINTAG NEWSLETTER @ 15 Decem­ber 2008 — “The USA will have to change. Obama will be forced to fol­low the reg­u­la­tion much of the rest of the world has. None are per­fect — the UK’s own FSA had no idea how to con­trol the lying banks and their made up bal­ance sheets, but at least there is a cul­ture of reg­u­la­tion, com­pli­ance manu­als, best prac­tice and most import­ant third part admin­is­trat­ors and prime brokers. I can­not think of 1 UK hedge fund that has gone down because of fraud.

  So here is some advice. If the fund you want to invest in has inde­pend­ent pri­cing, uses third party brokers and the man­agers and advisers are reg­u­lated, then move onto the next stage of the due dili­gence process.

  If not, and you invest, you are a fool and deserve everything you get.”

• Politico and Reu­ters Forge News-Distribution Alli­ance | NYTimes.com — Politico recently began offer­ing papers a lim­ited num­ber of free art­icles, and begin­ning this week the papers that sign onto that ser­vice, the Politico Net­work, will also see the stream of daily out­put from Reu­ters, and choose up to 10 art­icles and 10 pho­to­graphs each day to use in print or on the Web.

  Politico would gain the right to sell ads on the news­pa­pers’ Web pages con­tain­ing the Politico and Reu­ters art­icles — though not the prin­ted pages — and would share the rev­enue with the papers.

  At the same time, Reu­ters will begin car­ry­ing most of Politico’s work on its news wires.

  “Admit­tedly, this is an exper­i­ment,” said Jim VandeHei, exec­ut­ive editor of Politico. “But we’re sure there’s a need.”

• News About the News Busi­ness, in 140 Char­ac­ters | NYTimes.com — Ini­tially, The Media Is Dying was access­ible only to select Twit­ter mem­bers, as the feed was inten­ded to help those in the P.R. industry stay on top of the revolving entries in their address books. But requests to be included flooded the founder, who decided to go pub­lic three weeks ago. Since then, the stream, main­tained at twitter.com/themediaisdying by its founder and seven volun­teers from the industry, has garnered more than 3,000 subscribers.
• What Yahoo Should Do | blog mav­er­ick — Mark Cuban on Yahoo: “Yahoo should be on the warpath, vet­ting each and every media (yes media) and tech­no­logy com­pany it can sit down with look­ing for bargains.

  It should be tak­ing Yahoo stock and find­ing every and any accret­ive invest­ment in the inter­net and  media space that it pos­sibly can. Some may argue that Yahoo stock is too cheap to use for acquis­i­tions. I beg to dif­fer. The spec­u­la­tion around a poten­tial MicroSoft acquis­i­tion, along with a very strong bal­ance sheet  has propped up its stock.  Com­pared to private and pub­lic would be tar­gets, Yahoo stock is amaz­ingly strong currency.”

• China: Pop­u­la­tion by Age and Sex, 1950 — 2050; Pro­por­tion Eld­erly, Work­ing Age, and Chil­dren — This anim­a­tion of China’s pop­u­la­tion demon­strates the dra­matic change in the country’s age struc­ture between 1950 and 2050. While the num­ber of chil­dren was increas­ing rap­idly between 1950 and about 1970, it is now declin­ing sig­ni­fic­antly, due to China’s strict one-child fam­ily plan­ning pro­gram. In the next few dec­ades, China will exper­i­ence a most ser­i­ous pro­cess of pop­u­la­tion aging — as can be seen by the shrink­ing base of the pop­u­la­tion pyr­amid and the increas­ing num­bers of people age 50 and above.
  The bars in the lower half part of the anim­a­tion rep­res­ent the per­cent­ages of eld­erly (age 60+), work­ing age pop­u­la­tion (age 20–59) and chil­dren or young adults (0−19) in the pop­u­la­tion. For instance, it is pro­jec­ted that 31% of all Chinese will be above the age of 60 in the year 2050!
• A Scan­dal in Chicago That Jus­ti­fies Invest­ig­at­ive Journ­al­ism | NYTimes.com — Or does it? “This week, Dan Mihalo­poulos, Ray Long, John Chase, David Kid­well and oth­ers at the paper con­tin­ued to work every angle on the Blago­jevich invest­ig­a­tion, and fol­low some of their own. But some people at the news­pa­per, and those who have left, won­der whether The Tribune’s com­mit­ment to cov­er­ing cor­rup­tion is sustainable.

  Mr. Crewd­son, who had worked in the Wash­ing­ton bur­eau, was not so concerned.

  In an e-mail mes­sage, he said the fin­an­cial con­di­tion of his former paper would not “have kept Fitzger­ald from find­ing out what he wanted…”

• Peter Pre­ston | The Guard­ian — Let’s con­sider the power of the press — its alleged abil­ity to break but­ter­flies on wheels, des­troy repu­ta­tions, butcher box-office hopes.

  So, what’s this movie you want to drag me out for on a winter night? ‘Zero fun,’ say America’s fiercest crit­ics; ‘a con­fused mess’; ‘the coal in the hol­i­day stock­ing’. In Bri­tain, the ver­dict is the same. Try ‘crass and grisly’ from Philip French, ‘pure ordure’ from the Guard­ian and ‘the least fest­ive film yet made’ from the Times. Not to men­tion the Mail’s ‘tempta­tion to fol­low the baby in the film, whose only tal­ent is for pro­jectile vomiting’.

  Well, that would seem to have killed off Reese Witherspoon’s Four Christ­mases pretty effect­ively, no chain­saws required. Except that it’s been num­ber one in Amer­ica and the UK for two weeks run­ning, put­ting all com­pet­i­tion — includ­ing Mr Murdoch’s new bush tur­key, Aus­tralia — to the sword. Media power? Watch Joe Pub­lic take his seat in the stalls and squash it flat.

• Shock News? The Media Didn’t Get Us Into This Mess | FT.com — When Iceland’s bank­ing sys­tem col­lapsed in Octo­ber, the prob­lem was not that the media had pan­icked depos­it­ors. On the con­trary: even as the money mar­kets utterly lost con­fid­ence, Brit­ish news­pa­pers were claim­ing that Icesave offered one of the best sav­ings products around.
• Esto­nia to vote by mobile phone in 2011 | The Asso­ci­ated Press — Par­lia­ment has approved a law mak­ing Esto­nia the first coun­try to allow vot­ing by mobile phone.
  Law­makers approved a meas­ure Thursday allow­ing cit­izens to vote by mobile phone in the next par­lia­ment­ary elec­tions in 2011.
  Esto­ni­ans were allowed to cast Inter­net bal­lots in last year’s par­lia­ment­ary vote.
  The mobile-voting sys­tem, which has already been tested, requires that voters obtain free, author­ized chips for their phones, said Raul Kaidro, spokes­man of the SK Cer­ti­fic­a­tion Cen­ter, which issues per­sonal ID cards in Estonia.