This is some of what’s caught my attention in the past hours:

• Tony Blair appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Guardian – "The former prime minister exploited a flaw in The Daily Show concept… answer a difficult question earnestly, even boringly, and you can be sure that Stewart will be forced to change the subject sooner, in order to keep things funny."
• Journalists Lose at Harvard | The Harvard Crimson – “Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of the events themselves.”
• Dear Journalism Industry, aka Jo | The Bobby Pin – "I read that with mixed feelings. I totally get the need for stability, decent pay, etc., and yet, there's still something to being a reporter that I, at least, can't seem to shake off."

  Good luck with your new gig! I'm sure you'll miss the newsprint side of life, but you'll do great at whatever you're planning, too. (PR, right?)

• Telegraph journalist: I’m pessimistic about the new newsroom culture | Media | guardian.co.uk – "The reporters who wrote the news were almost the definition of "hacks" – writing to order, keeping to a formula, preaching to the shires. They were certainly professional. They were good at what they did and kept you reading all the way to the end of the piece. But, unless it was a juicy court case, it was not facts they were reporting. Their mission was to demonstrate that Tory Britain was alive and well and would ultimately defeat the evils of Socialism.

  One of the ironies of this approach was the undoubted fact that a number of the journalists were themselves Labour voters, even activists."

• RTS Wales Public Service Broadcasting Event | Ofcom – "[I]t is worth highlighting the debate around direct government funding especially because the Scottish Broadcasting Commission looks to the UK Government to fund its suggested channel which it estimates will cost between 50 and 75 million pounds a year.
  It may well be that the SBC was influenced by events here in Wales where there is already have a successful example of direct funding of public service content, in the shape of S4C’s funding from the DCMS, where arms’ length oversight has ensured that independence has been retained."
• Hitler’s rise and stock prices | vox – Around the globe, politically connected firms are more valuable (Faccio 2006). Nazi Germany was no different, but the sheer magnitude of the connection premium is astounding. Why did early connections with the party pay off as handsomely as they did? We do not know if loyalty was rewarded with additional contracts, loans on favourable terms, or in some other way such as privileged access to foreign exchange.
  What is clear is that not enough firms sought to affiliate with the Nazis prior to January 1933 to drive the expected benefit – as seen by stock market investors – down to zero. This means that either many firms expected the benefits from association to be low (the Nazi party’s rise to power may have been a genuine surprise), or that they would not contemplate giving support for a variety of political reasons.