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:

• Med­ical and Nurs­ing Stu­dents’ Tele­vi­sion View­ing Habits: Poten­tial Implic­a­tions for Bioeth­ics | The Amer­ican Journal of Bioeth­ics — More than 80% of med­ical and nurs­ing stu­dents watch tele­vi­sion med­ical dra­mas. Stu­dents with more clin­ical exper­i­ence ten­ded to have impres­sions that were more neg­at­ive than those of stu­dents without clin­ical exper­i­ence. Fur­ther­more, view­ing of tele­vi­sion med­ical dra­mas is a social event and many stu­dents dis­cuss the bioeth­ical issues they observe with friends and fam­ily. Tele­vi­sion med­ical dra­mas may stim­u­late stu­dents to think about and dis­cuss bioeth­ical issues.
• AP study finds $1.6B went to bailed-out bank execs | Yahoo! News — Banks that are get­ting tax­payer bail­outs awar­ded their top exec­ut­ives nearly $1.6 bil­lion in salar­ies, bonuses, and other bene­fits last year, an Asso­ci­ated Press ana­lysis reveals.
  The rewards came even at banks where poor res­ults last year fore­told the eco­nomic crisis that sent them to Wash­ing­ton for a gov­ern­ment res­cue. Some trimmed their exec­ut­ive com­pens­a­tion due to lag­ging bank per­form­ance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar exec­ut­ive pay pack­ages.
  Bene­fits included cash bonuses, stock options, per­sonal use of com­pany jets and chauf­feurs, home secur­ity, coun­try club mem­ber­ships and pro­fes­sional money man­age­ment, the AP review of fed­eral secur­it­ies doc­u­ments found.
• “Holy Fuck­ing Shit I Was Just In A Plane Crash!” | Alley Insider — A Con­tin­ental air­lines 737 slid off the run­way in Den­ver last night.  The engine on the right side burst into flames. Pas­sen­gers escaped out the left side on slides. 38 people were hurt. For­tu­nately no one was killed.

  In another first for Twit­ter, pas­sen­ger Mike Wilson tweeted his mira­cu­lous escape. Read from the bot­tom up. And then buy this man (and every­one else on the plane) a vodka tonic!

• Who needs the AP? | Frank Barnako — [M]any pub­lish­ers are fig­ur­ing out they don’t need the AP.  With national and inter­na­tional news hav­ing become a com­mod­ity, why does any news­pa­per out­side of the Top 5 mar­kets felt it needs to have a vanilla ver­sion of a Pres­id­en­tial announce­ment, a Con­gres­sional vote, or even an air­plane cash. The news is read­ily avail­able online and via radio and TV.
• The Con­ser­va­tion Law of Trans­par­ency (you can’t be open in all things all the time) | The Long Tail — Trans­par­ency is hard work. Con­stantly updat­ing the world on your status can become a job all by itself.

  For example, our exper­i­ments with trans­par­ency at Wired have mostly been one-offs. The behind-the-scenes polit­ics of a Microsoft story. The cre­ation and edit­ing pro­cess of a Charlie Kauf­man pro­file. Col­lect­ive edit­ing of Wired.com story.

  Why don’t we do this with every story? Because it’s a huge amount of work, eas­ily doub­ling the time required for any pro­ject. We can only do a few a year, and that’s why it’s been releg­ated to proof of concept rather than stand­ard prac­tice. Nobody’s figured out how to intro­duce true trans­par­ency into com­pany prac­tice without mak­ing it somebody’s full-time job.

  That’s why we see so little true trans­par­ency in prac­tice (Fred Wilson’s super­hu­man efforts aside) and even those like me who are drawn to it have to releg­ate it to just a single aspect of their life.

• China Blocks Access to The Times’s Web Site — NYTimes.com — Chinese author­it­ies have begun block­ing access from main­land China to the Web site of The New York Times even while lift­ing some of the restric­tions they had recently imposed on the Web sites of other media outlets.

  When com­puter users in cit­ies like Beijing, Shang­hai and Guang­zhou tried to con­nect on Fri­day morn­ing to nytimes.com, they received a mes­sage that the site was not avail­able; some users were cut off on Thursday as early as 8 p.m. The block­ing was still in effect on Sat­urday morning.

• Qual­ity journ­al­ism? | Sac­red­Facts — “Is Auntie really now plan­ning to para­chute Richard Sam­brook into the pos­i­tion of Dir­ector of the World Ser­vice without doing a proper external trawl for can­did­ates or advert­ising out­side the BBC?“

  1. I’m not a can­did­ate for the job, because
  2. it reports to me and I will be decid­ing who gets it.