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:

• The economics of moving from print to online: lose one hundred, get back eight | Monday Note – “Corporate money will inevitably percolate into news economics through service contracts, requests for expertise, corporate communication assignments. The boundaries between sectors will blur. It already happened in the universities where contract-based private grants co-exist with fundamental research — and to some extent subsidizes it. The same mechanism will occur in the news business.”
• Sky v Government and Virgin (ITV stake) [2008] CAT 25 (29 Sep 2008) | Reckon LLP – “Sky lost. The Competition Commission and minister largely won.”
• The Elite Newspaper of the Future | American Journalism Review – Ever heard of the Economist? “The mass audience is drifting away, and resources should be focused on the leadership audience. If existing newspapers don’t do it, new competitors will enter their markets and do it for them.”
• A ‘Tabloid Guy’ Calls It a Night After 41 Years With Murdoch | NYTimes.com – “When I first came around, there was some very good newspapermen in New York,” Mr. Dunleavy said. “But increasingly, they started leaning on this Columbia School of Journalism thing. That you wanted your mom to be proud. That it was a profession.“Journalism is a craft, like being a master plumber. We wore white collars, but we were blue collar.”
• ITN’s chief executive quits | Digital Spy – “ITN chief executive Mark Wood is to step down from the role after five years, it was confirmed today.Wood has served as ITN’s chairman since 1998 and was appointed chief executive in 2003. He will leave the broadcaster early next year but will remain as chairman for “a period”.”
• Turning to the TV for explanations and answers | IHT – The recipe for success on a business TV channel: “Mark Hoffman, the president of CNBC, said the network had focused for years on “the delicate balance in business between fear and greed.”When there’s an aggressive move to one extreme or the other CNBC engagement surges,” he said”
• Misbehaving works out for Toby Young | LA Times – Something from nothing: “I thought I was on this upward career trajectory. And then it all went completely pear-shaped. I really did nothing for five years. Vanity Fair was like a career cul-de-sac. At the end of it, I thought, ‘I have to have something to show for those years.’ I was determined to extract something from nothing.”
• About the Media 100, 2008 edition | Advertising Age – What is media? “Media is defined as information and entertainment content distribution systems in which advertising (including branded entertainment) is a key element. Revenue includes what media companies collect from marketers (advertising); from consumers (subscriptions, fees, movie tickets, DVD sales); and from other media companies (TV licensing/production).”
• DAG closed down | Newspaper Innovation – “The 4th Dutch free daily, DAG by PCM and KNP telecom, closed down after less than one and a half year. DAG had a circulation of 380,000.High competition and a problematic economy forced the publishers to close the operation.”
• Nothing to Fear but Irresponsible Words | Jeff Matthews – “What happened to the heroic, forward-looking rhetoric great leaders are supposed to provide in times of crisis?FDR gave us “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

  Churchill gave us “We shall fight on the beaches.”

  George Bush cruises in with “This sucker could go down.”

  We wonder: has a more irresponsible sentence been uttered, by anyone, during this entire crisis?”

• Tricky questions for Newsnight | The Guardian – ‘”When Paxman’s there, if there’s a strong editor, and if it is on form, the budget is irrelevant.”Paxman, though, is contracted for only 100 days a year…’
• We risk losing national news bulletins, warns Michael Grade | MediaGuardian – Money for news please: “The ITV executive chairman, Michael Grade has warned that without support for public service broadcasting, the network could not guarantee the long-term future of sacrosanct institutions such as national news.Grade voiced his concerns that national news might ultimately not be financially viable at a Royal Television Society London conference on Friday.”
• Book Review: Crude Continent | FT.com – “Clarke…takes issue with the “oil curse” thesis assiduously promoted by sundry environmentalists, academics, non-governmental organisations, the media and African politicians: “The evident corruption and negative elements associated with oil, on which a great deal is written, are a small part of a wider impact arising from corporate oil’s portfolio and are less than is popularly imagined.”The most negative consequences, he says, have less to do with corporate “malevolence” than with Africa’s “medievalism and the flawed politics of its imperfect states, which do not have the centuries of nationhood behind them … ” The root dilemma, he writes, is in the political apparatus, not in the possession of oil wealth, citing Angolan experience to validate his judgments.”
• Book Review: A Most Wanted Man | FT.com – “Notwithstanding that it was marketed as a near-documentary reflection of the author’s experiences as a spy, it was in reality a world as stylised, self-sufficient and quasi-abstract as that of Tolkien.In ‘A Most Wanted Man’ all the expected buttons are dutifully pushed: the millennial paranoia of European security services, the spooky, never quite visible insinuation of the Russian mafia, the creeping medievalisation of western society, the outrageous absence of secrecy where extraordinary rendition is concerned.

  It felt to me throughout, however, that the job Le Carré was attempting to do is performed more thoroughly and hauntingly by investigative journalism.”

• “Ironique et eurosceptique” | England Expects – Blogger blocked: “I have a formal warning and, if I continue to blog then ‘sanctions’ may be applied. Given that the sanctions amount to upwards of a four month docking of wages, I really cannot afford to continue.”
• A Weary Titan? | Economic Principals – “In 1905 Britain began to cuts its naval and military budgets.  The same year a General Staff study ventured that an army of 120,000 British troops might be sufficient to check any attempted German invasion of France.  When the war finally came nine years later, the economy-sized force wasn’t nearly sufficient. It didn’t deter the Germans, nor stop them once they began to march; it was only enough to draw Britain into a protracted war, by the end of which, the United Kingdom would lose seven times its ante in battlefield casualties alone.  Such are the perils of wishful thinking.”