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.