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:

• New York Times Co. in Talks With Car­los Slim on Pre­ferred Stock Invest­ment | WSJ.com — The New York Times Co. is in dis­cus­sions with Mex­ican bil­lion­aire Car­los Slim about invest­ing in the news­pa­per pub­lisher to help ease its fin­an­cial prob­lems, accord­ing to people famil­iar with the matter.
• Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? | NYTimes.com — As news­pa­per rev­enue col­lapses and tele­vi­sion rev­enue stag­nates, every media com­pany is rush­ing to reformat news for the digital gen­er­a­tion. To that end, they are pla­cing expens­ive bets in the hope of answer­ing two poin­ted ques­tions: How will news organ­iz­a­tions con­tinue to sus­tain them­selves? And what will the digital news­room of the future look like?

  To a greater degree than most other media com­pan­ies, CNN, the cable news chan­nel of record, has figured it out. Using page views as a met­ric, Nielsen ranked CNN.com as the No. 1 cur­rent events and global news Web site last year, with a monthly aver­age of 1.7 bil­lion — half a bil­lion views more than its nearest com­pet­itor, MSNBC.com.

  Ana­lysts say the Web site rep­res­ents the fastest-growing part of CNN’s rev­enue, reflect­ing the sharp increase in online consumption.

• Israeli-trained Gaza doc­tor loses three daugh­ters and niece to IDF tank shell | Haaretz — Israel News — Stra­tegic com­mu­nic­a­tions: “Through­out the war, Abu al-Aish had put a face on the Palestinian suf­fer­ing, mak­ing reg­u­lar reports by cell phone to Israel’s Chan­nel 10. He is a rar­ity among Palestini­ans, a Hebrew-speaker who trained in two Israeli hos­pit­als — the Sor­oka hos­pital in Beer­sheba just 18 miles from Gaza, and Tel Aviv’s Tel Hashomer hospital.

  His tragedy promp­ted numer­ous calls of con­cern to the sta­tion, many from
  people who know him.

  “We all know and love him well at Sor­oka, and we really hope the situ­ation gets bet­ter,” Dr. Shaul Sofer, head of the ER at Sor­oka who taught Abu al-Aish.”

• Liam Hal­ligan: The res­cue has failed — it’s time to fess up, reboot and start again | Tele­graph — In the UK and US, in par­tic­u­lar, the banks aren’t play­ing ball. They think they’re more power­ful than our elec­ted offi­cials, and for the last six months they have been get­ting away with hid­ing losses and bury­ing mis­takes while screw­ing many bil­lions of pounds out of tax­pay­ers.
  Look at the cause of this latest spasm. Oppos­i­tion politi­cians point to the Government’s decision to lift the ban on short-selling – allow­ing traders to pile pres­sure on bank stock. That misses the big­ger pic­ture.
  Bank shares col­lapsed on Fri­day because of renewed fears that said banks have simply enorm­ous liab­il­it­ies on their books that they’re still try­ing to hide.
• MI6 inform­ant Wang Yam found guilty of killing mil­lion­aire author to steal his iden­tity | The Times — The per­sonal qual­it­ies of con­fid­en­tial inform­ants: “A lead­ing Chinese dis­sid­ent who worked as an MI6 inform­ant was con­victed yes­ter­day of mur­der­ing a mil­lion­aire author to steal his identity.

  Wang Yam battered Allan Chap­pelow, 86, to death at his villa in Hamp­stead, North Lon­don, before try­ing to plun­der his bank accounts. Yam, 47, insisted through­out the police invest­ig­a­tion and two tri­als that he had been framed by “men with no alle­gi­ance to this country”.

  Most of the evid­ence was heard in secret after MI6 reques­ted that the press and pub­lic be excluded for almost all of the case.

  Jac­qui Smith, the Home Sec­ret­ary, agreed to a Pub­lic Interest Immunity cer­ti­fic­ate, mak­ing it the first murder trial covered by a secrecy order on the ground of national security.

  Before the order was gran­ted it was repor­ted that Yam was a “low-level inform­ant” for the intel­li­gence ser­vices and that “part of his defence res­ted on his activ­it­ies in that role”.”

• Update to Times of Lon­don ques­tion | Megan McArdle — I just received the fol­low­ing from someone identi­fy­ing him­self as Mike Har­vey of the Times of Lon­don, though it comes from a “Google­mail” address…
• Can This Org Chart Save News­pa­pers? | Har­vard­Busi­ness — There are not print cus­tom­ers and digital cus­tom­ers, just cus­tom­ers. As a res­ult, print and online units can both be stronger if they work together.

  Those on the inside of news­pa­per organ­iz­a­tions, engulfed of the strain of organ­iz­a­tional upheaval, can no doubt enu­mer­ate dozens of reas­ons not to change. How­ever, bring­ing print and online under com­mon lead­er­ship, and find­ing ways to bet­ter serve cus­tom­ers by select­ively join­ing print and online pro­cesses, is healthy and sensible.

  The his­tor­ical ant­ag­on­isms between print and online will no doubt make this pro­cess tough to nav­ig­ate. It will, inside some news­pa­pers, take the form of a emo­tional print vs. online power struggle. The com­pan­ies that per­form best over the next 3–5 years, how­ever, will be the ones that just get over it. They will adopt a “plat­form agnostic” mind­set and focus on what is best for the customer.