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:

• Bel­gian media tycoon buys major Dutch news­pa­pers | nrc.nl — The flaw in the not-for-profit model: “The Bel­gian media com­pany Persgroep Pub­lish­ing is set to acquire a major­ity stake in the Dutch media group PCM Uit­gevers, pub­lish­ers of NRC Han­dels­blad, de Volk­skrant and Trouw. PCM is cur­rently owned by non-commercial found­a­tions that were estab­lished to safe­guard the diversity of the Dutch press.”
• Rebates | THE FINTAG NEWSLETTER — Invest­ment bank­ing 101: “You work at Gold­mor­gan Stan­ley and you invest 100 mil­lion of the bank’s money into a fund and the fund gives you 1 mil­lion back. You book this rebate as income and take 20 per­cent as a bonus for doing noth­ing except pla­cing part of the banks bal­ance sheet (that is the share­hold­ers bal­ance sheet) into a hedge fund. 200k into your back pocket. A bonus for no work at all. A bonus for mov­ing some money around. (I am assum­ing no fund­ing costs and no other costs.) No won­der invest­ment banks are called invest­ment banks. It is a joke.

  Do this a few times and you can make quite a lot of fake income.”

• FT deputy: ‘Papers might start con­sid­er­ing char­ging online’ | Press Gaz­ette — “I think at the moment it would be very dif­fi­cult for a white sheet to charge for con­tent — although I heard a rumour an Amer­ican paper might do it,” [Mar­tin Dick­son] said.

  “The reason is most con­sumers of news have got used to hav­ing it for free. They would baulk at hav­ing to pay.

  “We can charge, as fin­an­cial news is some­what dif­fer­ent as it helps people do their jobs, and there­fore they’re will­ing to pay for it.

  “As you go for­ward, the white sheets may be able to start to think­ing about char­ging — the cur­rent busi­ness model is not look­ing at all healthy.

  “There may come a point where they have to say to read­ers ‘What we’re pro­du­cing is valu­able, you have to pay for it’. But right now, it would be a hard sell.”

• Beet.TV is on New Thompson Reu­ters Video Portal | Beet.TV — Thompson Reu­ters has announced a new online video video ser­vice as part of a $1 bil­lion plan to update the company’s products and infra­struc­ture.  I’ve pas­ted an image of the Beet chan­nel.  It is very cool how the videos are tran­scribed auto­mat­ic­ally and pos­ted adja­cent to the video.  This is an import­ant util­ity for vis­it­ors to read quickly and see if they want to watch.  Very cool.
• Inter­rup­tion Can Make an Exper­i­ence Bet­ter | NYTimes.com — This story isn’t going where you’re think­ing: “In sim­ilar exper­i­ments, using other video clips and a vari­ety of inter­rup­tions, the res­ults were the same: people rated their exper­i­ences as more enjoy­able with com­mer­cials , no mat­ter their con­tent, or other dis­rup­tions.. The effect wasn’t lim­ited to watch­ing TV; inter­rupt­ing a mas­sage also heightened people’s enjoy­ment, one exper­i­ment found.

  The oppos­ite was true for irrit­at­ing exper­i­ences, like listen­ing to vacuum cleaner noise: a break only made it seem worse, they found.”

• News­pa­pers are… | Joshua A. Pol­lock — “[A]re news­pa­pers really dying? Or are they just fail­ing to adjust, evolve and cap­it­al­ize on the new oppor­tun­it­ies for rev­enue presen­ted to them? And what is fair mar­ket value for an online advertisement?

  Now, I wish there was a defin­it­ive end-all, be-all answer to this prob­lem, and I’m sure we’ll find one in time, but I hon­estly believe the answer will ulti­mately lie within social media, the ulti­mate test­ing envir­on­ment for net­work theory.

  Ser­i­ously — how many of you have come to this post as a res­ult of my Gchat status, or a post­ing from my Face­book or LinkedIn pages? And how many of you have come dir­ectly to my site, enter­ing the URL in your browser’s address bar? Leave a com­ment & let me know!”

• News­pa­pers here sol­dier­ing on | The Japan Times Online — “Why are Japan­ese news­pa­pers suf­fer­ing sales losses and what are they doing to cope with the chan­ging environment?

  News­pa­per industry sources say young people are increas­ingly dis­in­clined to read the paper. In an unpre­ced­en­ted move, news­pa­per com­pan­ies are begin­ning to integ­rate and share dis­trib­ut­ors with their rivals to cut costs.

  The Yomi­uri, Asahi and Nikkei on Jan. 31 opened a joint Web site that shows only their news articles.

  The Sankei shocked the news­pa­per industry by present­ing its entire paper in the same lay­out as the print ver­sion for free for iPhone users. A Sankei offi­cial said the com­pany receives no ad rev­en­ues from the ser­vice and has yet to decide whether it will charge sub­scrip­tion fees or soli­cit advertisers.”

• What Comes After a Golden Age? | David Warsh — The excel­lent David Warsh: “The people we cover, we move in their world, but it is their world.  You can’t keep up. If you try to make this job about the money, you’ll just make your­self miser­able. Because we don’t get the money. Never have, never will.“

  I remembered that scene one day recently while sit­ting in a Star­bucks, wait­ing for a source to arrive. A single New York Times was left on the rack next to my chair. I watched as one cus­tomer after another picked it up, looked at it for the length of time it took the per­son at the head of the line to be served, and put it down again.

• In Bal­timore, No One Left to Press the Police | Wash­ing­ton Post — “Half-truths, obfus­ca­tions and appar­ent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which news­pa­pers, their staffs evis­cer­ated, no longer battle at the fron­ti­ers of pub­lic inform­a­tion. And in a city where offi­cials routinely plead with cit­izens to trust the police, where wit­nesses have for years been vul­ner­able to retali­at­ory viol­ence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hid­ing behind anonym­ity that is not only argu­ably illegal under exist­ing pub­lic inform­a­tion laws, but hypo­crit­ical as well.

  There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dino­saur that is the daily news­pa­per. So-called cit­izen journ­al­ists and blog­gers and media pun­dits have lined up to tell us that news­pa­pers are dying but that the news busi­ness will endure, that this moment is less tra­gic than it is transformational.

  Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blog­ger try­ing to find out McKissick’s iden­tity and per­form­ance his­tory. Nor were any cit­izen journ­al­ists at the City Coun­cil hearing…”

• Pel­ican book cov­ers | things magazine — Off topic: Pel­ican books visual archive
• Our Excerpt­ing Policy | Alley Insider — Who knew? “As long as you give us credit and links, we are not par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with the length of the excerpt.  Frankly, we’d rather have your read­ers read our words than your sum­mary of our words, and we see no reason why you should waste your time re-writing some­thing that we’ve already tried to say clearly.  (If we’ve garbled it, by all means…) If you occa­sion­ally feel you need to run our whole post to make the point, go ahead and run it.  Just con­sider adding a “Related” link to another of our stor­ies so some of your read­ers might come and check us out.”
• Top 10 News­pa­pers in Trouble | Real­Clear­Polit­ics — One down, nine to go?
• Peston’s run | The Guard­ian — “[W]ould the run have occurred without Peston’s broad­casts? Well, the Bank of England’s weekly return for Wed­nes­day 19 Sep 2007 would have noted a large increase in the “other assets” cat­egory of its bal­ance sheet – as it did any­way – imply­ing a large emer­gency loan of some sort had been gran­ted to someone. How­ever, it would have been unknown from the return to whom it was made. An even lar­ger sys­temic run may there­fore have ensued affect­ing all UK banks, as depos­it­ors wouldn’t have been able to tell banks apart. This, of course, would not have been a very desir­able outcome.

  So was Peston provid­ing a pub­lic ser­vice by con­fin­ing the run to a single insti­tu­tion? The 19 Feb pub­lic­a­tion date would have gran­ted cent­ral bankers almost one week’s reprieve. This would have been plenty of time for Bank gov­ernor Mervyn King and his staff to read up on the causes of his­tor­ical bank runs and thus urge the Treas­ury to imme­di­ately extend deposit guar­an­tees to 100% of all North­ern Rock deposits.”

• Demo­cracy can’t exist without news­pa­pers | The Inde­pend­ent — Dis­cuss: “Devolved Scot­land is a new and fra­gile polity in which debate takes place within a nar­row con­sensus. Its elect­oral sys­tem priv­ileges party over elect­or­ate and the rul­ing élite is self-selecting and jeal­ous of its priv­ileges. The country’s broad­casters are ill equipped to fill the vacuum left by its fail­ing news­pa­pers. Broad­casters can never do the job of a free press. At their best they provide bal­anced, inform­at­ive news. It is to news­pa­pers that cit­izens must turn for invest­ig­a­tion, expos­ure and cru­sad­ing zeal.”
• Mark Aus­tin and Julie Etch­ing­ham on the News at Ten | Tele­graph — And how much new money are ITN get­ting? “Given ITV’s cur­rent prob­lems, cyn­ics will won­der if the decision to have more prom­in­ent news on Fri­day even­ings is fin­an­cially motiv­ated. ITV is already pay­ing ITN to make a bul­letin on Fri­days; now, it will replace an expens­ive half-hour of peak-time programming.”