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:

• Berkman Pub­lic­a­tion Series — Media Re:public — Down­loads | cyber.law.harvard.edu — Down­load papers from Berkman’s Media Re:public series.
• New Ofcom chair, HFSS and Happy Fest­ivus from Ofcom­Watch — Chan­nel 4 con­tin­ues its beg-a-thon.  Really, this has been the most dis­taste­ful aspect of UK media policy for sev­eral years now.  It’s really embar­rass­ing to see the vague notion of ‘qual­ity’ be used as a rhet­or­ical device to simply secure reg­u­lat­ory bene­fits.  Maybe the new year will bring an end to it, one way or another.
• Wash­ing­ton News Bur­eaus Are Shrink­ing | NYTimes.com — The times may be news-rich, but news­pa­pers are cash-poor, facing their direst fin­an­cial straits since the Depres­sion. Racing to cut costs as they lose rev­enue, most have decided that their future lies in local news, not national or inter­na­tional events. That has put a bull’s-eye on expens­ive Wash­ing­ton bureaus.

  Albert R. Hunt, Wash­ing­ton exec­ut­ive editor at Bloomberg News, said he was taken aback by the mood Sat­urday night at a din­ner of the Wash­ing­ton press corps’ Grid­iron Club. “It was like being at a wake,” he said. “Every time you turned around, someone was talk­ing about their bur­eau being closed or downsized.”

• Recruiter told not to hire WoW play­ers | f13.net for­ums — Smile: “I met with a recruiter recently (online media industry) and in con­ver­sa­tion I happened to men­tion I’d spent way too much time in the early 2000s play­ing online games, which I described as “the ones before World of War­craft” (I went nuts for EQ1, SWG and the start of WoW, but since 2006 I have only put a hand­ful of days into MMOG play­ing — as opposed to dis­cuss­ing them — I’ve obsessed over bicycles and cyc­ling instead).

  He replied that employ­ers spe­cific­ally instruct him not to send them World of War­craft play­ers. He said there is a belief that WoW play­ers can­not give 100% because their focus is else­where, their sleep­ing pat­terns are often not great, etc.”

• Rob Kall: Bail Out Invest­ig­at­ive Journ­al­ists | HuffPo — It’s the com­pli­ance costs that are miss­ing: “We need a robust journ­al­ism com­munity here, even if the news­pa­per busi­ness is going to hell. Just as, in the past, artists and poets have been sup­por­ted, per­haps this is what we’ll need for writers now. Ima­gine if the gov­ern­ment fun­ded a “news con­ser­va­tion corps” of 10,000 invest­ig­at­ive report­ers at $50–80,000 salar­ies, plus health care bene­fits — cost­ing, say, an aver­age of $75,000 each –prob­ably a high estim­ate. Throw in another $225 mil­lion to pay for 3000 more edit­ors. That would cost less than a bil­lion dol­lars and provide the nation with prob­ably 50 times more invest­ig­at­ive reports than we now have.”
• News­pa­per eco­nom­ics | Free exchange — Some papers will sur­vive by selling things other than news—reputation, say, or exclus­iv­ity. Oth­ers will hang on until the print mar­ket shrinks enough that prof­it­ab­il­ity is pos­sible for a hand­ful (or fewer) of national papers. Sur­viv­ors in both groups are also likely to cap­it­al­ise on the demand for news products that remain scarce—especially invest­ig­at­ive reporting.

  And that indic­ates one area where some pub­lic sup­port for journ­al­ism might be abso­lutely neces­sary. Good, thor­ough invest­ig­at­ive report­ing is a non-excludable pub­lic good. If a good reporter digs up a major cor­rup­tion scan­dal at City Hall, every­one under the pur­view of the city gov­ern­ment bene­fits, even though far fewer will actu­ally shell out to read the cov­er­age. There’s good reason to think, then, that invest­ig­at­ive report­ing is under­sup­plied, par­tic­u­larly in small markets.