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:

• When Greed Is Good | Fred Wilson — “No 100% mort­gages even for War­ren Buf­fet. No low doc mort­gages. No fin­an­cing of clos­ing costs in mort­gages. Make all bor­row­ers have skin in the game. No lever­aging cap­ital 30–40 times for any fin­an­cial insti­ti­tions. No mort­gage based deriv­at­ives of any kind — why? Cause you can­not col­lect mort­gage pay­ments when the mort­gage is “embed­ded” and “divided” by secur­it­iz­a­tion. Teach the guys with mousse in their hair how to col­lect a past due pay­ment. No extraordin­ary com­pens­a­tion for invest­ment guys who are primar­ily salary­men — let them take a piece of their own deal if they want an equity style upside. No naked short selling. Ban short selling for 24 months. Then rein­state the uptick rule. Bring all hedge funds out of the woods and under the reg­u­lat­ory umbrella. If you want Amer­ican mar­kets, tax laws, secur­it­ies laws, etc, then you have to be reg­u­lated. Lower the cap­ital gains rate to 0% for 5 yrs because that’s how long it will take to work this through.”
• Study: respect for papers falls with stand­ards | FT.com — I wish they hadn’t used the bogus method of trust polling to draw their con­clu­sions: “The sys­tem of news­pa­per self-regulation is unsus­tain­able a high-profile panel will report on Monday.

  It says an inad­equate Press Com­plaints Com­mis­sion con­trib­uted to a decline in pub­lic trust in the press.”

• Mis­sion pos­sible? Char­ging for web con­tent | Reflec­tions of a News­o­saur — Life today would have been easier if news­pa­pers, magazines and other print-to-web media had recog­nized in the first place that their con­tent was too valu­able – and too expens­ive to cre­ate – to simply give it away on the Internet.

  This colossal stra­tegic mis­cal­cu­la­tion bit pub­lish­ers extra hard, because easy-to-acquire free con­tent on the web rap­idly under­cut the demand, and there­fore the rev­en­ues, for their flag­ship phys­ical products.

  “Why would con­sumers buy the cow when the milk is free?” I asked in one of the earli­est posts to this blog in Decem­ber, 2004. “If a news­pa­per gives away its costly and valu­able product for free on the Inter­net, it may win friends and influ­ence people in cyber­space, but it won’t glad­den the advert­isers who pay the freight back here on Mother Earth.”

• Dear Jay Rosen: You will lead journ­al­ism into the Prom­ised Land | Patrol Magazine — You’re mean. You were mean to a Tweeter: “Con­grats @stuedal You are the 1,279th per­son in my writ­ing career to inform me that what I’m observing is ‘noth­ing new’ or ‘not sur­pris­ing.’” You’re cruel to people who don’t know what they’re talk­ing about, like Neil Henry, who sniffed, “I can’t help but fear a future, increas­ingly bar­ren of skilled journ­al­ists, in which Google ‘news’ searches turn up not news, but the latest snarky rants from base­ment blog­gers.” You snapped, “He’s right: he can’t help, except in the fear department.”

  I love the way you use hip pop cul­ture ref­er­ences to chasten the upstarts: “Buzzword cri­ti­cism? I’m just not that into you. If you’re a writer you’ll fig­ure out what a good term SHOULD mean and use it only for that.” I like that you slice at Mother Jones and Sarah Palin and all the people still stuck replay­ing the 1990s pre-blog whine about media bias.

• Dan Lyons: Grow­ing Rich by Blog­ging Is a High-Tech Fairy Tale | New­s­week — I blogged in the middle of the night, hav­ing awakened with an idea. I ration­al­ized this insane beha­vior by telling myself that at the end of this rain­bow I would find a huge pot of gold. But real­ity kept inter­fer­ing with this fantasy. My first epi­phany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story reveal­ing my iden­tity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense pro­gram I earned about a hun­dred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was vis­ited by 1.5 mil­lion people, I earned a whop­ping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advert­ising deal that paid bet­ter wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.
• Peter Wilby: What, exactly, is the PCC for? | Peter Wilby — Wilby sum­mar­ises my book: “The pub­lic prefer rogues to hon­est, upstand­ing cit­izens. It is hard to believe any­one trusts the Sun or Mail to report news com­pletely accur­ately or to behave respons­ibly, but they remain the most suc­cess­ful daily papers of the past 40 years. They are trus­ted to provide good enter­tain­ment, scur­ril­ous gos­sip and con­sist­ent artic­u­la­tion of pop­u­lar prejudices.

  The Mail could be trus­ted to sup­port claims that the MMR vac­cine causes aut­ism because it never misses a med­ical scare story. It would have lost trust, expos­ing itself (to many read­ers) as a lackey of the med­ical and polit­ical estab­lish­ments, if it had taken a dif­fer­ent line.”