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:

• Layoffs: Valleywag cuts 60 percent of staff – "Gawker Media, our publisher, has told me to cut Valleywag's costs, in anticipation of an advertising recession. In response, I have laid off associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant. They have all been doing excellent work, breaking stories and needling Silicon Valley. But our ultimate boss, Nick Denton, has decided he can't afford them." – none
• Gawker Media Cuts Jobs, Suspends Bonuses | Jeff Bercovici – Denton: "Sites such as Consumerist, whose success has been measured more in traffic and recognition than in revenue, now need to cover their costs." – none
• Journalists cannot be blamed for newspaper industry’s decline | Roy Greenslade – Greenslade on Farhi: "If large media companies do collapse will the journalism of the future going to be a vocational activity? Now there's a question." – none
• Sarkozy plans to shake up France’s ailing newspapers | The Guardian – "The French state gives €1.5bn in direct and indirect state aid to the press each year. Keen to cut that budget, Sarkozy has ordered discussions on distribution, the role of journalists in society, and competition with free papers and the internet." – none
• Democracy versus the tube | FT.com – "[T]he media are now everywhere undermining democracy – by proposing and boosting a “democracy” of their own, through votes for winners in talent contests, or for those who must leave a Big Brother house or island. Or through making a game of politics. This is contentious: but the proofs lie in the use by television, and the internet, of the means of democracy – voting, association in groups for common purposes, political argument – for the ends of show business." – none
• ‘How to Lose Friends’ alienates its audience – Los Angeles Times – "Right around the point horn-dog magazine writer Sidney Young (Simon Pegg) is frantically scouring a fancy garden party for cocaine so he can take advantage of the dim-bulb starlet (Megan Fox) he's been fervently stalking, the putrid showbiz comedy "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People" appears to hit DEFCON 5 in mistaking its brand of moral laxity for cutesy irreverence." – none
• Give me liberty and give me death | Los Angeles Times – Not yet, Mr O'Rourke: "I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid … [M]y diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy's. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass … well, I'll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?" – none