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:

• Why I stay | John Robin­son — With the recent buy­outs, I’ve been asked more often than I like why I didn’t apply. After all, the sev­er­ance pack­age was gen­er­ous. The easy answer is also the true answer: I love what we do. If you believe, as I do, that the pur­pose of journ­al­ism is to provide people with the inform­a­tion they need to be free and self-governing then no other job will do. The abil­ity, the respons­ib­il­ity to pur­sue the truth as part of inform­ing and nour­ish­ing a demo­cratic soci­ety is a power­ful motivator.
• Talk­ing Busi­ness — Avoid­ing a Fin­an­cial Col­lapse, Indian-Style | NYTimes.com — [W]hen I went to see Deepak Parekh, the chief exec­ut­ive of HDFC, which was foun­ded in 1977 as the country’s first spe­cial­ized mort­gage bank, prac­tic­ally the first words out of his mouth were these: “We don’t do interest-only or subprime loans. When the bubble was going on, we did not change any of our policies. We did not change any of our sys­tems. We did not change our thought pro­cess. We never gave more money to a bor­rower because the value of the house had gone up. Cit­ibank has a few home equity loans, but most banks in India don’t make those kinds of loans. Our non­per­form­ing loans are less than 1 percent.”
• I Want My Rocky — We meet in this strange place in a noble effort to save the Rocky Moun­tain News. And if we can’t save the Rocky, we can, at min­imum, make some noise before we go. Since the day the pro­posed sale of the Rocky was announced, we’ve been wait­ing for the odd bil­lion­aire to join our cause. This may sur­prise you, but none has come for­ward. Appar­ently Phil and Tim and Pat and the rest of the team must have mis­placed our e-mail address. So, we turn now to the non-billionaires. We think there may be more of you.
• Inter­view with Clay Shirky, Part II :| CJR — I think, essen­tially, to get the right mix of both pub­licly subsidized—not just in terms of money but also pub­licly sup­por­ted in terms of time—journalistic organ­iz­a­tions is really going to take a cata­strophe. Because I don’t trust the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of news­pa­pers to actu­ally mean what they say when they talk about civic mis­sion, because none of them are say­ing, “We were in a hurry to get out from under this poor-profit model that’s pre­vent­ing us from liv­ing up to that civic func­tion.” All they’re really say­ing is, “If we’re say­ing ‘civic func­tion’ often enough, some­body ought to throw us a bail­out,” which, you know, is no dif­fer­ent from what GM is doing, which might be what I did if I were a CEO of a newspaper.
• The Death Throes of Print? | Jason Santa Maria — Com­pet­i­tion makes for innov­a­tion. Without the print edi­tion to serve as the flag­ship product, the web­site will no longer be a second class cit­izen or a quaint add-on to a busi­ness model; it will become the busi­ness model. Com­pan­ies will need to rethink their strategies and goals for the web, and ways to dis­tin­guish them­selves. If a pub­lic­a­tion or a few hap­pen to break out of the cur­rent mold and start innov­at­ing, this may cause other pub­lic­a­tions, whether still main­tain­ing print edi­tions or not, to become com­pet­it­ive online as well.
• Why Net­books Are Greener Than Laptops | GigaOM — The vast major­ity of net­books are powered by Intel’s Atom pro­cessor, an energy-efficient chip inside of the laptops lis­ted with the Envir­on­mental Pro­tec­tion Agency’s Energy Star pro­gram. How effi­cient is it? Atom sports a max­imum thermal design point (TDP) of 2.5 watts; com­pare that with Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips, which have a TDP of 65 watts.