These are some of the things I’ve been read­ing. I don’t agree with them all. And it’s a more eclectic mix than just the news busi­ness, but then so’s life:

• Alan Meck­ler, Web­Me­di­aBrands Inc. Fire 60 (Memo) | Busi­ness­In­sider — A CEO writes: “Spe­cif­ics on our busi­ness:  we have wit­nessed firsthand the huge decline in rev­enue with the Medi­abis­tro job board num­bers. This power­ful and vibrant busi­ness used to run paid list­ings for 200 plus jobs a day. Presently the num­ber is sig­ni­fic­antly lower.  Advert­ising, the lifeblood of Internet.com, has declined markedly in the recent quarter.  Event regis­tra­tions have been weakening.”
• Sur­vival: Some­thing a former Soviet pro­pa­gand­ist can believe in | Los Angeles Times — A voice from my child­hood: “In the shad­owy and mutu­ally sus­pi­cious realm of today’s Rus­sia, Pozner draws cri­ti­cism from both extremes of the polit­ical spec­trum. Hard-liners look askance at his lib­eral lean­ings and for­eign upbring­ing; oppos­i­tion fig­ures scoff that he’s the journ­al­istic equi­val­ent of polit­ical parties set up by the Krem­lin to cre­ate the appear­ance of robust opposition.

  “For [the gov­ern­ment] he plays this role: ‘Look, we have this per­son and he’s a lib­eral and you can see him on our TV,’ ” said Sergei Mur­atov, a tele­vi­sion critic and journ­al­ism pro­fessor at Moscow State Uni­ver­sity. “I don’t think they’re par­tic­u­larly happy hav­ing him on the First Chan­nel, but he’s a very fam­ous journ­al­ist and they don’t want to lose him.”

• Secrecy that is in the pub­lic interest | John Robin­son — One thing that news­pa­pers do: “We the people do put a lot of faith in the wis­dom of our lead­ers. Or, at least, our lead­ers seem to think that we do. Examples: * The City Coun­cil fired the city’s top exec­ut­ive last night, without pub­lic dis­cus­sion, and some of the coun­cil mem­bers seemed to think it was OK not to explain the action. * A group of county com­mis­sion­ers con­tin­ues on its road of fir­ing whomever without pub­lic dis­cus­sion or even board dis­cus­sion, as noted quite well by Doug Clark. * And, of course, the depar­ture of the chan­cel­lor of A&T remains basic­ally unex­plained. In many ways this is a good thing for the news busi­ness, with all the con­tro­versy being stirred up. So, hoo­ray. But I’m inter­ested in hear­ing the case that this much secrecy on the part of the county’s lead­er­ship is in the pub­lic interest.”
• Yahoo Con­sor­tium moves into second phase | PoMo Blog — From Terry Heaton: [S]ome observ­ers, includ­ing usab­il­ity guru Jakob Nielsen, strongly believe that the long-term viab­il­ity of any kind of ban­ner strategy is a los­ing pro­pos­i­tion. In an email about The Times art­icle, Nielsen told me that the prob­lem isn’t tar­get­ing; it’s banners.

  “Tar­geted is prob­ably *slightly* bet­ter than non-targeted, but not by much. The main prob­lem is that users ignore the ban­ners. When you never see a ban­ner, it doesn’t mat­ter whether it’s tar­geted or not.

  As a sep­ar­ate ques­tion, it’s not clear how quickly users’ intent and interest decay after they have con­duc­ted a search. In the moment of a search, we know that users are fairly likely to click on an ad that’s advert­ising the thing they searched for, as indic­ated by a keyword match between the query and the advertiser’s spe­cific­a­tion of the cam­paign. But how use­ful is the same keyword match for pre­dict­ing users’ will­ing­ness to click 10 minutes later, let alone 10 days later?”

• 389 Years Ago | Wall­stats — Whatever your polit­ics, it’s a fant­astic poster: “This poster is not a tally of African-American achieve­ments, rather it is a record of pro­gress and set­backs. While Obama’s elec­tion is not the endgame of equal­ity, it is a mag­ni­fi­cent example of what is truly possible.”
• Lex: ITV | FT.com — “A man is not old until regrets dis­place ambi­tion. This age­ing pro­cess is accel­er­at­ing for Michael Grade, who jumped ship from the BBC two years ago to make his for­tune with a prom­ised turnround of ITV. That has moved into reverse. The exec­ut­ive chair­man, who turns 66 on Sunday, on Wed­nes­day announced a fur­ther 11.5 per cent of the broadcaster’s staff would lose their jobs and shred­ded the “content-led growth plan” he announced in Septem­ber 2007.”
• Thriller king For­syth stumbles into Africa may­hem | The Asso­ci­ated Press — For­syth said he came here for “the fla­vor, the odor, of a pretty washed up, impov­er­ished, failed West African man­grove swamp.“
  “I thought, what is the most dis­astrous part of West Africa, and by a mile, it’s Guinea-Bissau,” he said. “If you drive around you’ll see why: one wrecked build­ing after another, one moun­tain of garbage after another. A navy with no ships, an air force with no air­planes. No infra­struc­ture, no elec­tri­city. Everything is purchasable.”
• Intel­li­gence Lapses: The Risks of Rely­ing on ‘Chat­ter’ | TIME — [A]lmost any­one who reads the news today knows that any phone con­ver­sa­tion can be mon­itored, by the U.S. or another com­pet­ent intel­li­gence ser­vice. An oper­at­ive recently back from Iraq tells me that Kur­d­ish polit­ical lead­ers sys­tem­at­ic­ally script tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions among them­selves in order to mis­lead the Amer­ic­ans, Ira­ni­ans and Turks, who the Kurds know are listen­ing to their phone calls. Since tran­scripts of these calls carry the weight of scrip­ture in Wash­ing­ton, we risk being led into another intel­li­gence fail­ure in Iraq. For that mat­ter, how do we know that al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tri­bal areas is not trans­mit­ting spoofed mes­sages as dis­in­form­a­tion, caus­ing our Pred­at­ors to strike inno­cent tar­gets with the pur­pose of turn­ing the loc­als against us? (See pic­tures of the battle against the Taliban.)

  The oper­at­ive back from Iraq says the room for exploit­ing our gull­ib­il­ity when it comes to chat­ter is wide. “There is little under­stand­ing of decep­tion in the agency anymore.”

• The Good, the Bad and the Con­sumer | Columbia Biz School — “Hol­brook com­pared the opin­ions of pro­fes­sional crit­ics with those of reg­u­lar movie­go­ers but con­trolled for market-related phe­nom­ena such as advert­ising, trail­ers, num­ber of open­ing screens and pro­mo­tional appear­ances by the stars of the film.

  Hol­brook found that, absent of the influ­ence of mar­ket­ing and pro­mo­tional cam­paigns, movie­go­ers expressed views sim­ilar to those of pro­fes­sional crit­ics. In fact, they were five times more likely to exer­cise “good taste” than Hol­brook suspected.

  People will always flock to theat­ers to see the latest Hol­ly­wood block­buster regard­less of what crit­ics have to say, but accord­ing to Hol­brook, “If you take away the con­tam­in­at­ing influ­ence of the mar­ket­place — advert­ising dol­lars, pro­mo­tional budgets and put­ting a movie on every screen in every shop­ping mall — you find that people actu­ally do like what’s good.”

• A Voucher Sys­tem for Invest­ig­at­ive Report­ing | Balkiniz­a­tion — Ana­lysis cor­rect, rem­edy prob­lem­atic: “There’s no guar­an­tee that private demand will pro­duce the socially optimal quant­ity of invest­ig­at­ive polit­ical report­ing. Muck­rak­ing is a pub­lic good, and rational con­sumers would rather bene­fit from hav­ing the other guy pay for it. The same impulse that under­lies the “rational ignor­ance” of voters may under­cut the private market’s pro­vi­sion of polit­ical information.

  Invest­ig­at­ive report­ing in the old days seemed like it was a loss-leader in the inform­a­tion bundle to which we subscribed.

  The bot­tom line is that we may need to pub­licly sub­sid­ize invest­ig­at­ive report­ing if we’re going to get enough of it.”

• Google’s Schmidt: Twit­ter is poor man’s email | Medi­aFile — Beware rational product-functionality ana­lyses: “Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks Twitter’s suc­cess is won­der­ful, but he’s not par­tic­u­larly impressed with the product’s usefulness.

  In fact, Schmidt deems Twit­ter and products of its ilk “poor man’s email sys­tems,’ as he told the crowd at the Mor­gan Stan­ley Tech­no­logy con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco on Tuesday.

  Twitter’s text-based mes­saging ser­vice, which lim­its mes­sages to 140 char­ac­ters, can’t com­pare to all the fea­tures and stor­age cap­ab­il­it­ies of a full-fledged email product, Schmidt said.”

• Doused in acid | The Hoot — From India: “[S]hould  media eschew  report­ing  and com­ment­ary on reli­gious sub­jects because some­body some­where will be offen­ded in a volat­ile soci­ety, or should it per­sist with being a space where reli­gion in all its mani­fest­a­tions can be dis­cussed?  Should M F Hussain’s paint­ings con­tinue to be denied pub­lic exhib­i­tion because they offend Hindu sens­ib­il­it­ies or should civil soci­ety defend an artist’s right of expres­sion? And above all, should the admin­is­trat­ive and legal sys­tem uphold free speech and free expres­sion that is within the law, or should it capit­u­late to the mob by paci­fy­ing them with arrests?

  The simplest and most elo­quent defence came from act­ress Nan­dita Das who poin­ted out that the last ten years have seen a steady decline in tol­er­ance and a steady rise in fear. Surely, she said, there should be some scope for nuanced con­ver­sa­tion in a demo­cratic society?”

• What An Anti­trust Case Against Google Might Look Like | Tech­crunch — “[T]he argu­ment that Google has mono­poly power and that it abuses it does not require demon­strat­ing that Google’s search is super­ior or inferior. It does not require estab­lish­ing that Google could do a bet­ter job with organic search, or even that it delib­er­ately does not do a bet­ter job with organic search. It does not require show­ing that con­sumers are harmed dir­ectly by lower qual­ity organic search, if indeed lower qual­ity organic search exists. It surely does not require estab­lish­ing that Google got its mar­ket share illeg­ally. It merely requires estab­lish­ing that Google has mono­poly power in a mar­ket that is not con­test­able, and that it is abus­ing that power to over­charge cor­por­a­tions and deter mar­ket entry in other businesses.”
• ‘You can have politi­cians without demo­cracy, but not demo­cracy without inde­pend­ent journ­al­ism’: Mac­Shane tells HoC | Jon Slat­tery — Mac­Shane, a former pres­id­ent of the NUJ, said: “We all have prob­lems with journ­al­ists but whereas it is pos­sible to have politi­cians without demo­cracy, I do not believe that it is pos­sible to have demo­cracy without inde­pend­ent journ­al­ism, and print media are essen­tial: digital media could never replace them.
  “How­ever, we are see­ing a massive erosion of our print media. Journ­al­ists are going out of the door region­ally, loc­ally and nation­ally. Lord Carter may be twit­ter­ing away on the digital prob­lems, but we need more urgent exam­in­a­tion now of how we are to keep our print news­pa­pers and trained journ­al­ists alive and in business.”
• Former WSJ editor talks about invest­ig­at­ive report­ing online | montanakaimin.com — Paul Steiger: “It’s dif­fi­cult for many news­pa­pers to charge their read­ers for online view­ing, and advert­ise­ments on online news­pa­per pages gen­er­ate very little rev­enue because big­ger search sites like Google buy up most of the avail­able ads, he said. Instead of rely­ing solely on these two means of fund­ing, lim­ited gov­ern­ment sub­sidies and non-profit sup­port can help news organ­iz­a­tions sur­vive down the road, he said.  Cross-subsidies, such as com­pan­ies that own dif­fer­ent busi­nesses as well as a news­pa­per or magazine, may also be an answer to future print journ­al­ism fund­ing prob­lems, he said.”