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:

• Before Israel’s Inva­sion, Hamas Pop­ular­ity Was Wan­ing Among Its Neigh­bors — Even in Gaza Itself | Pew Research Cen­ter — A Nov. 20–23, 2008 poll by the Jer­u­s­alem Media and Com­mu­nic­a­tions Cen­ter found that 37% of Palestini­ans would vote for Fatah in legis­lat­ive elec­tions, com­pared with just 20% for Hamas. In the Fatah-controlled West Bank, Fatah led Hamas by a 35–18% mar­gin. More inter­est­ingly, Fatah also led by a 40–22% mar­gin in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. A poll by the Palestinian Cen­ter for Policy and Sur­vey Research, con­duced Decem­ber 3–5, 2008, also found that Fatah was more pop­u­lar than Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza.
• Bail­ing Out One of the 20th Century’s Best Busi­ness Mod­els: What’s black and white and red all over? News­pa­pers look­ing for a handout, that’s what! | Reason Magazine — [A]s one who is famil­iar with the num­bers, you could prob­ably print at least three Reason magazines (com­plete with web­site, blog, the whole nine yards) for the cost of one élite-newspaper opin­ion sec­tion, with its 14 pages a week. Are the elites three times bet­ter? You tell me.
• The Start-Ups We Don’t Need | The Amer­ican, A Magazine of Ideas — [W]hen gov­ern­ments inter­vene to encour­age the cre­ation of new busi­nesses, they stim­u­late more people to start new com­pan­ies dis­pro­por­tion­ately in com­pet­it­ive indus­tries with lower bar­ri­ers to entry and high rates of fail­ure. That’s because the typ­ical entre­pren­eur is very bad at pick­ing indus­tries and chooses the ones that are easi­est to enter, not the ones that are best for start-ups. Rather than pick­ing indus­tries in which new com­pan­ies are most suc­cess­ful, most entre­pren­eurs pick indus­tries in which most start-ups fail. So by provid­ing incent­ives for people to start busi­nesses in gen­eral, we provide incent­ives for people to start the typ­ical busi­ness, which is gone in five years.
• Wel­come site eval­u­at­ors to the first glimpse of Glob­al­Post | GroundTruth — Glob­al­Post began a beta test by about 100 site eval­u­at­ors today. And so we wel­comed the first small com­munity on to the site in advance of our live launch on Janu­ary 12, which is just four days away and counting.
• Eng­lish courts and libel tour­ists | The Eco­nom­ist — Groups that invest­ig­ate gov­ern­ment mis­be­ha­viour say their efforts are now being hampered by Eng­lish libel law. “Lon­don has become a mag­net for spuri­ous cases. This is a ter­ri­fy­ing pro­spect to most NGOs because of legal costs alone,” says Dinah PoKem­per, gen­eral coun­sel at the New York-based Human Rights Watch. It recently received a com­plaint from law­yers act­ing for a for­eign national named in a report on an incid­ent of mass murder. “We were required to spend thou­sands of pounds in defend­ing ourselves against the pro­spect of a libel suit, when we had full con­fid­ence in the accur­acy of our report,” she says.

  The prob­lem is not just money. Under Eng­lish libel law, a plaintiff must prove only that mater­ial is defam­at­ory; the defend­ant then has to jus­tify it, usu­ally on grounds of truth or fair­ness. That places a big bur­den on human-rights groups that com­pile reports from con­fid­en­tial informants—usually a neces­sity when deal­ing with viol­ent and repress­ive regimes.

• How You Can Help Us Flag Great Journ­al­ism (Now Even Easier!) | ProP­ub­lica — If you have an account with the book­mark­ing site Deli­cious, now all you have to do is tag an art­icle “PPlinks” and we’ll see it right away. (If you don’t already have an account, Deli­cious is just a handy way to share links. It’s easy to sign up for. And no, we’re not get­ting any Delicious-y kickbacks.)