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:

• The News­pa­per Industry and the Arrival of the Gla­ciers | Boing Boing — It didn’t take much vis­ion to fig­ure out that unlim­ited per­fect copy­ab­il­ity, with global reach and at zero mar­ginal cost, was slowly trans­form­ing the print­ing press into a latter-day steam engine.

  And once that became obvi­ous, we said so, over and over again, all the time. We said it in pub­lic, we said it in private. We said it when news­pa­pers hired us as design­ers, we said it when we were brought in as con­sult­ants, we said it for free. We were some tire­some mother­fuck­ers with all our talk about the end of news on paper. And you know what? The people who made their liv­ing from print­ing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us.

• News Media Less Effect­ive at Con­vey­ing Ad Mes­sages | Mar­ket­ing Charts — “Only 28% of the audi­ence of an aver­age news pro­gram, web­site or magazine gets valu­able inform­a­tion about products and ser­vices advert­ised there, mak­ing news ven­ues less effect­ive at con­vey­ing ad mes­sages than all forms of media com­bined, accord­ing to con­sumer research from Experian Simmons.”
• A hunch that failed to pay off | FT.com — News­pa­pers which once aspired to Pulitzer prizes for their inter­na­tional or fin­an­cial report­ing are now look­ing at out­sourcing for­eign or busi­ness desks to wire ser­vices such as Bloomberg and Thom­son Reu­ters, to focus on areas in which they can be spe­cial­ists, such as local news.

  Other profit-boosting ini­ti­at­ives included using news­pa­per brands to drive ancil­lary rev­enue such as the income News Corp’s Brit­ish papers gen­er­ate from bingo and wine sales.

  Tribune’s dis­cus­sions with the own­ers of the Orange County Register, and the Las Vegas Sun’s agree­ment to share print dis­tri­bu­tion with a local rival high­light a new will­ing­ness to con­sider cost-saving con­sol­id­a­tion or once unthink­able alliances.

  Such deals will depend, how­ever, on fin­an­cing and on reg­u­lat­ors loosen­ing rules.

  Gor­don Crovitz, a former pub­lisher of the Wall Street Journal now advising private equity investors, says: “Sev­eral private equity firms have asked should they be invest­ing in news­pa­pers. What I now tell them is

• Kill the Media Zom­bies | The Daily Beast — In his fas­cin­at­ing piece about Dr. Samuel John­son in last week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik evoked the cul­tural and eco­nomic forces at work in Lon­don in the 1730s as: “the old-media dis­pens­a­tion in crisis and the new media hardly pay­ing.” Sound famil­iar? In Johnson’s day, writes Gopnik, “The prac­tice of aris­to­cratic pat­ron­age, in which big shots paid to be flattered by their favor­ite writers, was ebbing, and the new, middle-class arrange­ment, where plays and nov­els could com­mand real money, was not yet in place.” Let the good times roll.
• The Brit­ish­isms Are Com­ing! | CJR — Eng­lish — our gift to the world…
• News­pa­pers Aren’t Dying, Advert­ising Mod­els Are | Fran­cine Hardaway — You can talk all you want about how news is shift­ing online, how young people don’t read, how bur­eaus are shut­ting down, how great report­ing is dying. The fact of the mat­ter is, it has never been about news. It has always been about advert­ising. Where will people tol­er­ate advert­ising? Where will they hear it or look at it? It’s a con­stant battle between the consumer’s dis­taste for inter­rup­tion and the need to sell products.

  As urban areas grew and lit­er­acy grew with them, advert­isers figured out that there was an aggreg­a­tion here that they could use to announce and sell products.

  Well, now there’s a new kind of aggreg­a­tion and a new kind of lit­er­acy, and it is tak­ing place online. Good report­ing will even­tu­ally hap­pen online, because people are aggreg­at­ing there. The first news­pa­pers weren’t very good either–they were  sensationalist–like, say, The Drudge Report.