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:

• Journalism, Reliability and Wikipedia | Adam MacQueen – "Idly sabotaging the user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia following the UEFA cup draw back in August, a user of the b3ta web forum going by the name of “godspants” made a few amendments to the entry for Cypriot team Omonia Nicosia. He noted that they were sponsored by Natasha Kaplinsky, that their former players included Jean Claude Van Damme and Richard Clayderman, and claimed that “A small but loyal group of fans are lovingly called ‘The Zany Ones’ – they like to wear hats made from discarded shoes and have a song about a little potato.” As you do.

  Writing up his pre-match report on Omonia’s match against Manchester City for the Daily Mirror on 18 September, sports hack David Anderson decided to do some in-depth research. Thus it was that Mirror readers were informed that City manager “Mark Hughes will not tolerate any slip-ups against the Cypriot side, whose fans are known as the ‘Zany Ones’ and wear hats made from shoes”. "

• Financial markets crisis to hit newspapers hard | AIM Group – "21 percent of newspaper ads – particularly for national brands like The Wall Street Journal and USA Today – come from two main sectors: finance and insurance/real estate. That’s greater than their overall share of the U.S. ad market – 6 percent for the financial segment and 4 percent for insurance/real estate.

  The two segments have also been responsible for a significant chunk of ad growth over the past four years, at 23 percent of total growth, according to Bernstein."

• Google’s UK performance 1H2008 – a bigger share of everything | Virtual Economics – "[N]ot only has Google's share of UK paid search has risen from 78.5% to 81.4% but that its share of all online ad revenues has risen from 44.8% to 47.5%."
• Max and the City | Jon Slattery – "Hastings said The Guardian's media section had asked him four times to write for them but he had declined. He added: "When the adolescent at the other end of the line asked 'why?' I said 'can you name one ex-editor who pontificates about newspapers for whom you have the smallest respect' He giggled. I said 'I rest my case' ."
• THE FINTAG NEWSLETTER @ 08 October 2008 – "As a GBP50bn bail out fund is proposed to carve up RBS, Lloyds TSB, Barclays, HBOS et al, the angry City look at why and how a lowly BBC journalist can move the markets in such a way as to pre-empt this? If I were able to make these stocks fall 30%, I would go to prison."
• Newspaper-killing Google aims to hire newspaper-saving programmer [Adrian Holovaty] | Valleywag – "If Holovaty does land at Google, expect him to transform Google News into a site that's more of a database of information than a news archive. He's long been critical of the newspaper industry's focus on stories, rather than information. A police-blotter news report, for example, is not as useful as a website which displays crimes on a map by type and date. If Holovaty's going to save journalism, he may have to do it at a search engine that many believe is killing the newspaper business. They can't say he didn't warn them."