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 Secret Weapon of ‘The Daily Show’ | WWD.com – "Chodikoff doesn’t use Google to turn up inconsistencies, preferring news stories on LexisNexis, and he ignores Wikipedia. Explaining why he prefers print over the Web, he cites a scene from the movie “Back to School,” when Rodney Dangerfield asks his son why he’s buying used books. “And he says, ‘Because they’re already underlined, see?’ And Rodney says, ‘But that guy could have been a maniac.’ And that’s the problem with the Internet.”"
• France looks to save its newspapers | International Herald Tribune – "Analysts question the use of some of the public money. Schwartzenberg said more than €100 million went toward financing early retirement programs for the printers and delivery workers. Very little is spent on starting new publications or on the Internet, where French papers' audiences and ad revenue remain small."
• Are papers in freefall? Not if they innovate | The Observer – "Great papers such as the New York Times are 12 per cent down, and worse. But the NYT has been whacking up the price, cutting back on pagination and cutting off areas of former circulation as too expensive to serve. It's contrived some of its own desuetude. Maybe it ought to try turning tabloid."
• Will Self and I | Leonardo Morgado – Morgado on Self: "He was approachable, friendly and genuinely grateful for the support especially now as he feels that his journalism days maybe coming to an end as more and more newspapers are struggling to compete with very media savvy and internet knowledgeable competitors and therefore no longer want to pay for “fringe” voices."
• How To Become A Journalist: Some Practical Advice for Beginners | W.T. Stead – "[T]he first qualification of a journalist, if he would be a real journalist, is the possession of a heart. Hence I would say to any one who wanted to become a successful journalist: Be sympathetic. Avoid cynicism and indifference as the very devil. Regard indifference to any subject whatever as a proof of ignorance, and therefore of incompetence. Touch life at as many points as you can, and always touch it so as to receive and retain its best impresssions.

  If you do not feel strongly, you will not, as a rule, be able to write powerfully; and if your sympathies are deadened, and the eyes of the understanding are dulled, you will become a bore and an abomination, whose copy will descend into the wastepaper basket. For the first duty of a journalist is to be alive, and he who does not feel does not live."

• Berlusconi enjoys state aid | FT.com – The FT isn't keen on Silvio: "Banks and markets are tumbling but the crisis is benefiting Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian premier, whose treatment in parts of the media is nearing North Korean levels of adulation as his government exerts an authority not seen for decades."