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:

• A journalist outside of j-school | Megan Taylor – "I graduated from the University of Florida 5 months ago, and it took this long to realize that while I brag that everything I know comes to me from Google Reader and Twitter, I knew a lot more when I was surrounded by other journalists.

  I knew who the badass journalists were, I knew when and where the awesome conferences were and I knew where to turn for any other information I didn’t have at my fingertips.

  Now I’m 1,000 miles away from that network. I don’t know anybody here, I don’t know where to look for all the things I used to know."

• Journalism training bodies agree to work together | Press Gazette – "The launch of the new Joint Journalism Training Council was announced at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol this week. It will be chaired by Sky News online associate editor Simon Bucks, the Society’s outgoing president."
• Future of News | SacredFacts – "There's just that troubling issue of how we get an audience and advertisers to pay for it. Newspapers and broadcasters have lived for decades by selling audiences to advertisers. Now the number of eyeballs per page or per programme is falling – but we have much greater detail and granularity about where they are going and what they are doing online.  Media organisations have to find a way to extract the commercial value from that. 

  The risk otherwise is that  long standing newspapers or stations will disappear."

• Personal Walled Gardens | The Digital Journalist – "The world of personal walled gardens demands our attention and our study. Information widgets are a way to make our content available, so we desperately need to be in the widget business. The Weather Channel has a remarkable radar widget that I use on my iGoogle page. ESPN offers my sports news. I get entertainment news from E! Take the time to peruse the widget gallery that Google offers (they call them "gadgets") for personal pages with a single mouse click. Search "local news," and you'll find a host of local media companies making RSS feeds available via widget.

  But such widgets are just a small corner of what's possible, if we only have eyes to see. Traditional media is brand-obsessed, and, to a certain extent, justifiably so, but our brands can also blind us to possibilities that others — mostly outsiders — can easily see. The mission is to make money and to do it in ways that make sense, whether associated with content we create, aggregate, or organize."

• ProPublica’s Goldman Sachs Hatchet Job | Seeking Alpha – "ProPublica is a non-profit investigative-journalism shop founded by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. So you'd expect that when it moves into the world of finance, during a credit crisis which has thrown up its fair share of scandals, it would produce something really good.

  Instead, it's produced something really bad: a non-story about Goldman's sell-side research on munis, larded generously with ridiculous overreach and, naturally, a generous pinch of CDS demonization. Today, the story leads in the LA Times."

• Spot.us – Dave Cohn's innovative attempt at funding journalism direct.