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:

• Media Anthropology and Pedagogy | Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology – I don’t believe that this generation is any more digitally equipped than the last, and I hate it when journalists assume that it is (as they frequently do, given the number of requests I get to do interviews about how new media are causing children to evolve into large-thumbed, ADHD-addled, hacker-loving codemonkeys). In reality, some students have mad skillz, others have none.
• The Digital Slay-Ride: What’s killing newspapers is the same thing that killed the slide rule | Jack Shafer – Perhaps the most prescient of all digital prophets was scholar W. Russell Neuman, whose 1991 book, The Future of the Mass Audience, saw how the Web would overturn the existing order before the public World Wide Web even existed. The media—newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, cable, motion pictures, games, music, books, newsletters—all resided in separate "unique, noncompetitive" analog silos. Translating and transmitting from one format to another was "an expensive, labor-intensive endeavor," Neuman writes.
  By introducing these varied—and often monopolistic—media to a "single, universal, multipurpose network," the digital Web destroyed the old barriers and created new competitive pressures… In other words, CBS, the Times, Universal Music, Verizon, Blockbuster video, and anybody else who wants your media attention is fighting for your attention (mindshare and dollars) in the same kiosk.
• Options to save Channel 4 are narrowing | FT.com – The options to keep Channel 4 afloat are narrowing down to a tie-up with either the BBC or a commercial rival, it emerged on Tuesday, as the government appointed UBS to help it solve the funding gap in public service broadcasting.

  Although the investment bank will investigate a series of options, people close to the situation said that other possibilities, including a privatisation of the state-owned broadcaster and public funding for Channel 4 from the BBC’s licence fee, were sliding down the agenda. Early indications of the government’s direction are likely to come by the end of next month.

  EDITOR’S CHOICE
  Celts spurn Grade over single ITV – Dec-05

  Chief executive leaves Entertainment Rights – Dec-04

  Dogan share value plunges – Oct-20

  Financial sites see record spikes in visitors – Oct-17

  Obama online fundraiser to diversify – Oct-08

  McClatchy to cut 1,150 jobs – Sep-17

  “The government is going to take a very pragmatic view,” one person familiar with the issue told the Financ

• The silent talking heads of Harry Shearer | Greenwich Time – [Harry] Shearer, now 66, claims television has changed from a visual medium to verbal one, a trend driven by advertising.
  "I came out of radio, so television was being presented as this profoundly visual medium. In the early days, they were showing off what the visual possibilities were," he says. "But budgets being what they are today, visual content means you have to leave your little studio and occasionally go out somewhere and shoot something. What the 500-channel universe dictates is that nobody has the money to do more than that. You can sell just as many commercials when you have two people sitting in a cardboard closet with microphones on whether it's sports or news or cooking."
• The IFC Media Project – Bailing out the News? | HuffPo – We as a country have always been largely wary of government influence in our press because we fear journalism becoming a mouth piece for politicians. But the political apparatus in this country has already grown so savvy about message manipulation that is has effectively turned the private press into just that. Look at the selling of the Iraq War in print or on cable or the White House's payroll of proxy opinion makers. Just because the news business would take public funds does not mean that it would, should or could stop being a free press. Many of our allies in Europe and Canada have a partially nationalized media and not slipped into absolute dictatorships. So why not go public — either create a truly new national news organization or transform and fund the hell out of NPR?
• Apple’s iTunes, NPR, Barriers to Giving, and the “Appliancing” of National Boundaries | Hak Pak Sak – The Emergence of Google as the world’s prime search engine and the proprietary of Gmail, YouTube, and Blogger has given the “Company that Does No Evil” unparalleled knowledge of what is on the Web as well the ability to control how to find it. It also has given Google an unparalleled knowledge of who uses the web and how.  This has turned Google, a private company with no accountability to any constituency, into a negotiating partner of national governments whose laws or policies do not  reflect or respect the ethical stance claimed in Google’s own slogan.  Thus, Google now functions on a diplomatic level with the ability and clout to forge country-by-country compromises affecting internet activity and the free flow of information and opinion, Turkey’s YouTube and Blogger ban not least among them.