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:

• Journ­al­ists are biggest ter­ror­ists: Zardari | Pak­Tribune — Pres­id­ent Asif Zardari seems to be so unhappy with the media that he told a del­eg­a­tion of busi­ness­men from the NWFP recently that journ­al­ists were the biggest ter­ror­ists in Pakistan.
  Mem­bers of the del­eg­a­tion of the Sar­had Cham­ber of Com­merce & Industry (SCCI), which met the pres­id­ent on Janu­ary 15, quoted him as say­ing that journ­al­ists mis­re­por­ted things and presen­ted the situ­ation in a non-objective man­ner. They said the pres­id­ent felt the media should be care­ful in its hand­ling of sens­it­ive issues.…A PPP leader, who for obvi­ous reas­ons wished not to be named, con­firmed that the pres­id­ent did make the state­ment about journ­al­ists being terrorists.
• Peter Pre­ston: Sort­ing through a pile of roubles | The Guard­ian — It mat­ters hugely to Lebedev whether he has to com­pete against the Lite and Murdoch’s thel­on­don­pa­per. (The signs are that he will.) It mat­ters hugely to Asso­ci­ated to know whether a Lebedev Stand­ard would turn itself into a morn­ing paper, com­pet­ing dir­ectly with the Mail and Metro. It mat­ters per­son­ally to Rothermere to under­stand whether selling the Stand­ard would also hand Wap­ping vic­tory in the freesheet wars. It mat­ters migh­tily to James Mur­doch to under­stand whether the Lebedev deal would des­troy any imme­di­ate pro­spect of News Inter­na­tional win­ning a chunk of the Stand­ard in an even­tual peace deal. Everything connects.
• Do News­mags Still Mat­ter? | Howard Kurtz — US News Magazines — sweat­er­shops: “Meacham, wear­ing a dark sweater in his office over­look­ing Cent­ral Park, says that “we don’t edit with the idea that there is a poor and unin­formed reader out there who some­how needs illu­min­a­tion.” He sees his audi­ence as “the vir­tual Belt­way,” which he defines as people who watch Sunday talk shows, read news­pa­pers and buy hard­cover books.

  Sten­gel, wear­ing a dark sweater in his office with a view of the Hud­son River, says his philo­sophy, espe­cially online, is “news for smart people.… We are argu­ably the best-known news brand in the world, and we want to lever­age that.”

• If I had one piece of advice to a journ­al­ist start­ing out now, it would be: learn to code | Charles on… any­thing that comes along — My cod­ing? Not that great. Your cod­ing? Could be a lot bet­ter. Great cod­ing? You’d be able to knock up some­thing like the Guard­ian BNP map without a second thought. And the journ­al­ism then flows on from that, because you can see so much more clearly. If you’re track­ing the data, you’ll be able to see when some­thing changes, when some­thing unusual happens.

  None of which is say­ing you shouldn’t be talk­ing to your sources, and ques­tion­ing what you’re told, and try­ing to find other means of find­ing stuff out from people. But nowadays, com­puters are a sort of primary source too. You’ve got to learn to inter­rog­ate them effect­ively — and quote them mean­ing­fully — too.

• China Exports Will Be Gone for a While | Dili­gence China — My brother buys chem­ic­als in China and pro­cesses them for sale to man­u­fac­tur­ers in the US, Europe and parts of Latam.  

  He tells me that Chinese sup­pli­ers have a prob­lem.  In the run-up to the Olympics, Chinese sellers of chem­ic­als were push­ing everything they could out the door at shortage-level prices because they were facing shut­downs to help improve Beijing air qual­ity.  Now my brother’s ware­house in New Jer­sey is full of raw mater­i­als – bought at a high price in the first half of this year.  He can’t move his exist­ing invent­ory because down­stream demand is dead.  Lately he’s star­ted get­ting calls from Chinese sup­pli­ers who are try­ing to get him to buy more by slash­ing their prices.   He just laughs at them, because they are the same guys who jammed tons of high-priced goods on him when the mar­ket was run­ning high.

• How to sus­tain pub­lic ser­vice tele­vi­sion | FT.com — Bring a shot­gun, there’s going to be a wed­ding: “Simply allow­ing Chan­nel 4 to carry on as before but with the injec­tion of pub­lic money does not resolve struc­tural issues. What is needed is a solu­tion that has a long-term indus­trial logic while pre­par­ing both chan­nels for the “any time any­where” per­son­al­ised digital world.

  That solu­tion could be a mer­ger between Chan­nel 4 and Five. With this mer­ger, the future of both as pub­lic ser­vice chan­nels with their own iden­tit­ies would be guar­an­teed, deliv­er­ing real bene­fits to the pub­lic while stand­ing on their own two feet com­mer­cially. It would also lead to a more bal­anced tele­vi­sion land­scape – but one that would still be far more diver­si­fied than any other in Europe.”