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 Rosenbaum-Jarvis smackdown | John McQuaid – "[I]s there a risk that if you focus on technology and the changing relationship between the journalist and the news consumer, the fundamentals get lost in the shuffle? This is a problem at many newspapers, which in their relentless race to cut back and innovate simultaneously are literally trading journalism talent and experience for technical expertise.

  The focus on technology, form, and social networking is a big part of the puzzle. But content should be given its due."

• Does Local TV Have A Future? | Diane Mermigas – "Local TV station owners (many of them heavily in debt) are under pressure to modify high-cost legacy structure, leverage their unique local content and connections, and engage in new digital enterprises to collectively offset traditional ad declines. That means reaching beyond cash retrans fees from cable and telco operators to linking their local franchise brands with consumer electronics manufacturers like Apple, GPS operators, wireless mobile telephone and PDA manufacturers (like RIMM)."
• Alan Rusbridger: Local papers are vital – and must be saved | The Guardian – Is there any reason why local newspapers – whether in print, on broadband or broadcast – shouldn't compete with the broadcasters for some form of subsidy in return for providing the public service of keeping a community informed about itself?

  If you had asked that question a year or two ago most editors and owners would have been united in dismissing it out of hand. They would have argued that the press in Britain has been free of any kind of state subsidy for the best part of 200 years or more. They would have swiftly rejected the kind of regulatory strings that might be attached to a requirement to produce so-called public service content.

  But now?

• Quantum of Solace | Virtual Economics – "[T]hey've essentially recast Bond not as the mythical secret agent hero of the old 60s and 70s classics but as a sociopathic serial-killer who merely happens to be protected from the consequences of his murders by the license of his morally-bankrupt government."
• Why truth is in stories | Andreas Kluth – Isabel Allende: "'I think that’s why I’m a storyteller. I take all these disparate events and I have to connect them. I have to make them seem inevitable and yet surprising and plausible. That’s what I think life is like, too. I have the luxury to do exactly what it is we all need time to do, and that is just think about the mystery of life.'

  And how similar to a less poetic author, Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern who has:

  'a life-story theory of identity, which argues that modern adults provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose by constructing and refining self-defining life stories or “personal myths.”'

• Max Mosley: My sex life is of interest to no one but this squalid industry | Comment is free – "To expose in a newspaper the most private elements of someone's personal life is to impose on them and their family a terrible penalty. No civilised community should do this without very good reason. The lower reaches of the tabloid press have shown themselves wholly indifferent to the suffering they cause their victims and their victims' entirely innocent families. The courts can ensure that no one is made to suffer in this way unless the public interest truly requires it. No tabloid editor can be trusted to do so."
• Is Jeff Jarvis gloating about the death of print? | Ron Rosenbaum – Slate – "Look, there's nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing. He's said some savvy, if unoriginal, things about journalism (advocating looking at the article as an ongoing process, not a product, for instance). He's among the most rational of the new thinkers. But it's the callous contempt for working journalists that grates. It's a contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession for a brief shining moment—well, longer than that—before it became a platform for "reverse engineering."