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:
- Guest opinion: Ofcom overseeing unedifying cat fight | Ofcomwatch — Ofcom’s views will carry great weight with government in what has become an unedifying cat fight. It will have to decide between the various competing interests so as to cause, at minimum, least harm to the general public. Maybe it will even surprise people by supporting, for example, the democratization of spectrum allocation for local TV services. Or maybe next week’s PSB review will simply amount to a miserable zero-sum game with a cherry on top (encouragement of broadband for all, or some such.)
- Deal for Standard would be shift in DMGT | FT.com strategy — “We think the Mail and Mail on Sunday are wonderful businesses and we will invest.”
DMGT has, though, contemplated a re-branding. Being called the Daily Mail & General Trust will always label it a newspaper company, while the board is keen to change that image.
“We are so much more than a newspaper company,” Mr Williams concludes.
“To be honest, we don’t see this [proposed Evening Standard deal] as a hugely significant event.”
- We’ve officially started .. really | Bonae Famae: — A new resource from the BBC College of Journalism: “I’ve been hesitating before writing on this blog.
As Web Manager for the BBC’s College of Journalism website I have the responsibility of turning editor Kevin Marsh’s vision of a public facing learning facility for BBC journalists and journalists across the world into a reality.”
- Our Blogs And Your Blogs | Sky News — At the top of the “Your Blogs” page there’s a section where we are suggesting subjects you might want to blog about it — today it’s Obama and the recession. If you decide to do this, it’s important to copy and paste the right tag into the tag box of your blog post, so other people can see your blog post.
Of course you don’t have to write on the subjects we suggest. But eventually — if the posts are good — we plan to link to them from other parts of the Sky News website.
- How big will inaugural crowd be? Do the math | MSNBC — [S]ome fairly simple math can be used to make defensible estimates of crowd sizes.
The method goes back to the late 1960s and a Berkeley journalism prof named Herbert Jacobs, whose office was in a tower that overlooked the plaza where students gathered to protest the Vietnam War. The plaza was marked with a regular grid, which allowed Jacobs to see how many squares were filled with students and how many students on average packed into each grid…Jacobs came up with some rules of thumb that still are used today by those serious about crowd estimation. A loose crowd, one where each person is an arm’s length from the body of his or her nearest neighbors, needs 10 sq ft per person. A more tightly packed crowd fills 4.5 sq ft per person. A truly scary mob of mosh-pit density would get about 2.5 sq ft per person. The trick is to accurately measure the square feet in the total area occupied by the crowd and divide it by the appropriate figure, depending on assessment of crowd density.
- Gaza Conflict — news graphic | WSJ.com — What it says…