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:

• Num­bers Show News­pa­pers Head­ing for Demise | eMarketer — The news­pa­per industry, which is pin­ning its hopes for the future on fol­low­ing read­ers online, is in trouble. Online ad rev­en­ues are drop­ping as well. eMarketer estim­ates online news­pa­per ad rev­en­ues declined by 0.4% in 2008 to $3.15 billion.

  eMarketer pro­jects online news­pa­per ad rev­en­ues growth to drop in 2009 by 4.7% to $3.01 bil­lion. The reces­sion, the dis­mal state of the news­pa­per industry and the quarterly online ad spend­ing trends for 2008 all factor into these projections.

• ICC Sil­li­ness Watch — Non-Media Edi­tion | Opinio Juris — [E]ven if Israel has com­mit­ted war crimes in Gaza — and I cer­tainly believe it has — the ICC does not have jur­is­dic­tion over them … Israel is not a party to the Rome Stat­ute.  To be sure, Israel could accept the ICC’s jur­is­dic­tion ad hoc or the Secur­ity Coun­cil could refer the situ­ation in Gaza to the Court (as sug­ges­ted by the Inter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion for Human Rights).  But we all know how likely those scen­arios are.

  Ser­i­ously, guys, read the Rome Statute.

• INFO MINISTRY DENIES PAYING JOURNALISTS COVERING BY-ELECTION — Yahoo! Malay­sia News — Another busi­ness model for journ­al­ism: “The Inform­a­tion Min­istry today denied mak­ing any pay­ment to journ­al­ists cov­er­ing the Kuala Ter­eng­ganu par­lia­ment­ary by-election, polling for which is tomorrow.”
• Lebedev and The Even­ing Stand­ard | FT.com — Another van­ity pub­lisher is the last thing the news­pa­per sec­tor needs. Alex­an­der Lebedev, the wealthy former KGB agent, is close to buy­ing one of the most influ­en­tial Lon­don titles from DMGT. Own­ing the Even­ing Stand­ard, he cor­rectly sur­mises, will be “a good way to waste money”. This is a paper that could lose £15m-20m at the oper­at­ing level this year. If he hopes own­ing a trophy asset will con­fer com­pens­at­ing non-cash bene­fits — influ­ence, glam­our and prestige — he may be dis­ap­poin­ted. That type of money can buy lobbyists-a-dozen and acres of advertorial. Either way, such determ­in­a­tion to bank­roll a zom­bie busi­ness bodes ill for profit-oriented rivals hop­ing to eke some small change out of their own titles.
• Hamas and Israel fight a media war too: a war of words and images | The Eco­nom­ist — Israel’s cam­paign has suc­ceeded on the home front, with its own Jew­ish cit­izens remain­ing broadly enthu­si­astic about a war mostly por­trayed in admir­ing terms. It has conquered the Amer­ican House of Rep­res­ent­at­ives, too, which voted on Janu­ary 9th by 390–5 for a bill declar­ing “unwaver­ing com­mit­ment” to Israel. And it has even won over Samuel Joseph Wurzel­bacher, an Amer­ican every­man who won brief celebrity in the pres­id­en­tial cam­paign for his forth­right views as “Joe the Plumber”. Dis­patched by Paja­mas TV to report from Israel, he declared that its ban on war cov­er­age was a good thing.

  Yet wider sup­port among the Amer­ican pub­lic for Israel in this con­flict appears to be less robust than usual. A Rasmussen poll taken on Decem­ber 31st showed that while 44% of Amer­ic­ans were still for Israel, 41% were against it, a rel­at­ively high fig­ure. And that was before the bloody attack on a UN school and other such incidents.

• Times of Lon­don pla­gi­ar­iz­ing? | Megan McArdle — I came across this totally ran­domly — linked to the Elmer-DeWitt account to explain his 9 month dal­li­ance with altern­at­ive ther­apies, then googled for updated news, and thought:  “Wait a minute, I’ve read this some­where before”.  It’s pos­sible that this is not plagiarism–that David Rose is actu­ally Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s alter ego and thus owns the copy­right to that pas­sage, or that Mr Rose meant to attrib­ute the pas­sage and the html some­how got screwed up.
• Could It Be That Free Is Just Fine Until There Is A Big Break­ing Story And Then We’ll Cough Up The Money To Buy The Bet­ter Journ­al­ism In A Paid-For News­pa­per? | Fol­lowThe Media — What The Sun and The Daily Mir­ror learned dur­ing 2007 was that when they had really good stor­ies, exclus­ives or blanket cov­er­age of an event of great interest then their cir­cu­la­tion rose – wit­ness their cov­er­age of the McCann kid­nap story and the return by Iran of the UK sail­ors taken pris­oner. When they have a big story money seems no object — they spend what it takes.
  The prob­lem is there are far more slow news days than there are good news days. The tabloids have never recovered from los­ing Prin­cess Diana. Her pic­ture every day on the front page guar­an­teed loyal read­ers. No one has taken her place.