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:

• A crime paper flour­ishes by print­ing mug shots | csmonitor.com — At a time when dozens of US news­pa­pers are search­ing for buy­ers and for cash, The Slammer’s news­stand profit mar­gin is four times that of most local dailies, and its cir­cu­la­tion has grown to 29,000 – up nearly 50 per­cent from 20,000 just last year. At more than 500 con­veni­ence stores across North Car­o­lina, it’s selling at a buck a pop.

  In fact, the chief com­plaints the weekly paper gets come from perps com­plain­ing that their pho­tos didn’t get prin­ted. In Feb­ru­ary, the paper will expand its oper­a­tions from three major North Car­o­lina counties – includ­ing the cit­ies of Char­lotte, Raleigh, and Durham – to add Colum­bus, Ohio.

• Ser­vice Script­ing: A Customer’s Per­spect­ive of Qual­ity and Per­form­ance | Cor­nell — Many hos­pit­al­ity ser­vices are scrip­ted, under the the­ory that scripts are an effi­cient method of ensur­ing a con­sist­ent level of ser­vice qual­ity… As a start­ing point, this study found that cus­tom­ers are able to detect when scripts are in use in both kinds of inter­ac­tions… For the stand­ard­ized inter­ac­tion, respond­ents to this study repor­ted no dif­fer­ence in their per­cep­tions of ser­vice qual­ity regard­less of whether the scen­ario was highly scrip­ted, mod­er­ately scrip­ted, or relaxed (essen­tially, impro­vised). In con­trast, for the con­ci­erge ser­vice, respond­ents per­ceived that a heavy use of script­ing dimin­ished ser­vice qual­ity. At the same time, a mod­er­ate or relaxed approach to script­ing for the cus­tom­ized con­ci­erge scen­arios had no effect on respond­ents’ per­cep­tion of ser­vice qual­ity. This study sug­gests that hotel man­agers should be cir­cum­spect in script­ing cus­tom­ized encoun­ters, but may apply scripts to stand­ard­ized ser­vices without dimin­ish­ing per­cep­tions of ser­vice quality.
• Early to the game but late to learn how to play | Yelving­ton — While we were build­ing Star Tribune Online, we went from one or two to about a hun­dred local mom-and-pop Inter­net ser­vice pro­viders. We tried to con­vert STO into an ISP, run­ning Nets­cape on top of the Inter­change cli­ent, but it was too late.

  The Web had arrived, pathetic and weak but open and extensible.

  Many of us who were there at the time knew that human inter­ac­tion, not news­pa­per read­ing, would be the most power­ful motiv­ator of online usage. Cer­tainly I knew it; I had run a dia­lup bul­letin board for years as a hobby. But as hun­dreds of news­pa­pers rushed to “go online,” few even bothered to ask basic ques­tions about con­tent strategy. It was, many declared as if they were say­ing some­thing wise, “just another edition.”

  But it’s not.

• End Times | The Atlantic — If 80 per­cent of the NYT staff ends up laid off, many of them won’t find their way to new report­ing jobs. But over the long run, a world in which journ­al­ism is no longer weighed down by the need to fold an omni­bus news product into a lar­ger lifestyle-tastic pack­age might turn out to be one in which actual report­age could make the case for why it mat­ters, and why it might even be worth pay­ing for. The best journ­al­ists will sur­vive, and even­tu­ally thrive. Some will be snapped up by an expand­ing HuffPo (which is rais­ing mil­lions while its print com­pet­it­ors tank) and by the inev­it­able com­pet­it­ors that will spring up to imit­ate its busi­ness model, or even by smal­ler out­lets, like Talk­ing Points Memo, which have found that keep­ing their over­head low allows them to profit from high-quality journ­al­ism. And some will suc­ceed as inde­pend­ent oper­at­ors. [T]he death of the NYT would be a sen­ti­mental moment, and a severe blow to Amer­ican journ­al­ism. But a dis­aster? In the long run, maybe not.
• Brit­ish Home Office Crime Maps — A bit clunky, but a start…
• Spokesman’s Unit hails ‘fair’ cov­er­age | Israel | Jer­u­s­alem Post — The IDF has spent the past six months learn­ing to fight a dif­fer­ent kind of media war, devel­op­ing a capa­city to take its mes­sage to the ‘new media,’ a gen­eral term for a wide vari­ety of on-line social net­work­ing, user-generated news and per­son­al­ized con­tent sites.

  “In terms of com­mu­nic­at­ing our mes­sage, new media is the future,” Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu, the IDF’s spokes­man, told The Jer­u­s­alem Post.

  Benayahu has over­seen a new ori­ent­a­tion in the spokesman’s unit toward these on-line out­lets, even tak­ing his unit’s senior officers to an intens­ive new media work­shop at the Inter­dis­cip­lin­ary Cen­ter, Herz­liya in mid-2008. This has trans­lated into a pro­fu­sion of new ini­ti­at­ives across the Internet.

  A You­Tube chan­nel estab­lished by the IDF a day after the fight­ing began has become the second-most pop­u­lar chan­nel on the pop­u­lar global video-sharing site, draw­ing over 386,000 page views in the first half of Thursday alone.

  Mean­while, the IDF has been in reg­u­lar con­tact with over 50 major Am

• A Neur­omar­keter on the Fron­tier of Buy­ology | NYTimes.com — Ms. Yudof­sky … wants to spe­cial­ize in research that involves pub­lic ser­vice advert­ising, the cam­paigns for non­profit organ­iz­a­tions and causes that ad agen­cies typ­ic­ally cre­ate on a pro bono basis.

  Cur­rent ways to eval­u­ate advert­ising are sig­ni­fic­antly flawed, Ms. Yudof­sky says. “By going dir­ectly to the brain, look­ing at the regions involved in decision-making, it will make a great dif­fer­ence” in devel­op­ing cam­paigns that effect­ively, say, curb smoking or dis­cour­age drunk driving.

  With a grant from the Yale Med­ical School and a psy­cho­logy pro­fessor as adviser, Ms. Yudof­sky is begin­ning to study pro bono ads inten­ded to reduce obesity; she is review­ing brain activ­ity on M.R.I. machines to find ways to improve their message.

• Split­ting the Schizo­phrenias | The Cor­pus Cal­losum — Fam­ily interest, in case you wondered: “When I was in train­ing, the chair­per­son (John Gre­den) of the depart­ment never spoke about schizo­phrenia.  Instead, he always used the phrase, “the schizo­phrenias.”  He believed that there were dif­fer­ent dis­ease states that all pro­duced sim­ilar clin­ical present­a­tions.  But because of the rudi­ment­ary state of our know­ledge, we were unable to make clear, mean­ing­ful dist­ic­tions between these dif­fer­ent illnesses.”
• The Fall of GM — a visual guide | WallStats.com The Art of Inform­a­tion — Many aspects of this graphic can apply to the rest of the Big Three but I focused on GM since they are in the most dire pos­i­tion.  GM has many woes, the least of which is a short­fall of money, so why do people think that an infu­sion of cash will do any­thing but pro­long the agony?
  So here it is, a visual guide to why GM won’t be around much longer.  Unless of course they can actu­ally form a game plan to get some of these meta­phor­ical ship­ping con­tain­ers off their backs.  Another thing I wanted to stress is that the con­ver­sa­tion about the decline of Gen­eral Motors involves sin­gu­lar fin­ger point­ing. “It’s the uni­ons”, “It’s ma
• Can Par­tis­an­ship Save Cit­izen­ship? | The Amer­ican Pro­spect — The rebirth of civic par­ti­cip­a­tion this year is not a product of exper­i­ments in delib­er­at­ive demo­cracy or a new interest in league bowl­ing. Rather, it is based on party polit­ics, coupled with and accel­er­ated by new oppor­tun­it­ies provided by the Inter­net. Skocpol’s claim that “con­flict and com­pet­i­tion have always been the mother’s milk of Amer­ican demo­cracy” tells part of the story. Just as social-movement the­or­ists might have pre­dicted, the major innov­a­tions came from out­siders, like mem­bers of MoveOn.org, who wanted to chal­lenge the sys­tem. At the time when it led oppos­i­tion to the Iraq War, MoveOn rep­res­en­ted a point of view that had little sup­port among polit­ical elites, which meant it wouldn’t have been able to use con­ven­tional tools of interest-group polit­ics even if it had wanted to. Instead, it turned to the Inter­net and cre­ated a new model of mass mobilization.
• Gaza — Al-Jazeera Eng­lish, CNN Inter­na­tional, and BBC World | Fol­lowThe­Media — The Gaza bomb­ing and Israeli ground assault is Al-Jazeera’s oppor­tun­ity to prove to the west­ern world that its Eng­lish lan­guage TV news ser­vice could be watched by main­stream west­ern view­ers with some resemb­lance of report­ing bal­ance from both sides. And by and large it’s doing ok.

  Much of Al Jazeera’s report­ing centered on the human­it­arian aspect, with no short­age of verbal reports and pic­tures of women and chil­dren in agony, but it also car­ried Israeli gov­ern­ment state­ments and had many live inter­views with Israeli gov­ern­ment and mil­it­ary spokespeople. While the ques­tion­ing was hard it was, for the most part, fair.

• How the news­pa­per industry tried to invent the Web but failed | Jack Shafer — It would be easy to accuse edit­ors and pub­lish­ers of being clue­less about the com­ing Inter­net dis­rup­tion and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for dec­ades of haughty atti­tude, bad plan­ning, and incom­pet­ence is bank­ruptcy.
  But news­pa­pers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and pre­serve their fran­chise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski’s 2004 book, Digit­iz­ing the News: Innov­a­tion in Online Newspapers.