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:

• Ofcom PSB review — what will hap­pen? | Ofcom­watch — Ofcom and the gov­ern­ment are chok­ing tele­vi­sion from three sides:  (i) state own­er­ship and its accom­pa­ny­ing inef­fi­cien­cies, pat­ron­age and reg­u­lat­ory cap­ture; (ii) out­dated man­dates that spe­cify quotas and cer­tain con­tent that must be provided; and (iii) numer­ous illegal and fin­an­cially harm­ful advert­ising restrictions.
• News­pa­pers turn into rich mens’ toys | FT.com — The $5.6bn Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp paid in 2007 for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal and sev­eral local papers, would now be suf­fi­cient to buy Gan­nett, the New York Times, McClatchy, Media Gen­eral, Belo and Lee Enter­prises, even at twice their cur­rent share prices. The Dow Jones titles are now sup­por­ted by more stable cable chan­nels and film stu­dio rev­en­ues, just as the Wash­ing­ton Post is pro­tec­ted by the far lar­ger income its par­ent com­pany makes from its Kaplan edu­ca­tion arm.
• Brit journ­al­ists who under­stand US polit­ics | The Daily Novel — I omit­ted to men­tion in my blog this morn­ing on Jim Naughtie’s elo­quent cur­tain raiser from Wash­ing­ton on the Inauguar­a­tion, that Naugh­tie has told me sev­eral times how much he owes his under­stand­ing of US polit­ics and US journ­al­ism to the Laurence Stern Fel­low­ship hos­ted by City Uni­ver­sity, Lon­don. Naugh­tie was the second win­ner (in 1981) of this fel­low­ship which sends a young Brit­ish journ­al­ist to work at the Wash­ing­ton Post for three months each summer.

  Another grate­ful fel­low (1992) is Jonathan Freed­land, a colum­nist on The Guard­ian, who wrote that newspaper’s splash this morn­ing, ‘Magical spell that will open new Amer­ican era’. It is the kind of head­line that makes pro­fes­sional journ­al­ists des­pair of The Guard­ian; it would be a rot­ten head­line even on the fea­tures pages.

  But, pre­sum­ably, that head­line was writ­ten by a sub-editor.

• Cor­rect­ing an Error about Dopam­ine Sig­nal­ing | Pure Ped­antry — if I give you a cookie that you didn’t expect one morn­ing, you are like “Nice!  Free cookie.”  You release dopam­ine.  In con­trast, if I give you a cookie every morn­ing for sev­eral weeks, this cookie has become a pre­dicted reward; hence there is no fur­ther release of dopamine. Dopamine release would change if you expec­ted to get a cookie every morn­ing and I didn’t give you one.  This would be an omit­ted expec­ted reward, and it would cause a reduc­tion in dopam­ine release.

  The reason that dopam­ine func­tions in this way is because it trains your beha­vi­oral responses… The dopam­ine is released in areas of the brain such as the stri­atum and frontal cor­tex that func­tion in decision mak­ing.  The com­pu­ta­tion that these regions make is that whatever the activ­ity was when the dopam­ine was released, well, let’s do more of that because it was reward­ing.  Whatever you are doing when the dopam­ine was released, let’s do that again.

• The White House Has a New Web­mas­ter | Val­ley­wag — The first blog post of the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion prom­ises “com­mu­nic­a­tion,” “trans­par­ency,” and “par­ti­cip­a­tion.” It does not allow comments.
• Saucy study reveals a gene that affects aggres­sion after pro­voca­tion | Not Exactly Rocket Sci­ence — Many stud­ies tend to focus on “altru­istic pun­ish­ment”, where people take a per­sonal hit to pun­ish oth­ers for the good of the group. But in this exper­i­ment, those who paid to pun­ish received no returns on their “invest­ment” — they were act­ing out of spite, which McDer­mott describes as the “neg­lected ugly sis­ter of altruism”.

  Spite has been invest­ig­ated recently in a study which showed that stu­dents from 16 cit­ies around the world var­ied greatly in their tend­ency to pun­ish oth­ers spite­fully or “anti­so­cially”. That study attrib­uted the dif­fer­ences to how the vari­ous soci­et­ies felt about free-loading and how strongly respec­ted the rule of law. But it would be equally inter­est­ing to see if the low activ­ity ver­sion of MAOA was more com­mon in some of these coun­tries than in others.

• Let’s talk about the eco­nom­ics of great journ­al­ism | Ratclif­feB­log — Hav­ing been in and around journ­al­ism, cit­izen journ­al­ism and pub­lish­ing for a long time, let me sug­gest we stop talk­ing about the eth­ics of provid­ing com­plete and use­ful inform­a­tion to cit­izens of a demo­cracy, which are barely changed by the require­ments of social media and cloud com­put­ing tech­no­logy, in isol­a­tion from the eco­nom­ics of journ­al­ism. If someone deliv­ers great journ­al­ism on a reg­u­lar basis, what does it cost to do it? What is it worth to you to get bet­ter news cov­er­age of an import­ant issue?
  Let’s posit that if the journ­al­ism is “great” or even “good,” it will be eth­ical, and face the prob­lem of pay­ing for the change we want.