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:

• Stuff White People Like: Journalism? | The Editorialiste – "Starbucks plays music heard on The Wire, which gets written about in Slate, which has an agreement with NPR, which reviews books available in Borders, which sells coffee and expensive sandwiches."
• The Magazine Industry’s Crisis of Conscience – "At a time when the best comedy and the best drama on TV (that would be 30 Rock and Mad Men, respectively) make no secret of their willingness to write sponsors into their scripts, it's hard to argue that letting ad dollars influence content is an absolute evil."
• Craig’s List had NOTHING to do with a decline in classified ad revenue | Institute for Analytic Journalism – "[T]he big change that pushed classified ad volume up in the 90s was employment advertising. Damn right. The country added 30 million new jobs in that period, and the number of new people entering the workforce declined because births had declined in the mid-1970s. More competition for bodies = more advertising needed.

  Knock out the employment data and everything else stayed steady or INCREASED for newspaper classified."

• Newspapers Jettisoning Top Talent to Cut Costs | NYTimes.com – "Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve."
• Not Dead: The Paid-for Online Model | MondayNote – "All business models built on advertising are now in grave peril.

  Take Facebook. 100m users, most of them active, a trillion page views per year, about two hours spent per month and per user. 300k images are uploaded every second, creating by far the biggest photo library in the world with more than 10bn images, 4 x Flickr’s.

  Under the surface (the huge part of the iceberg, expenses), numbers are equally staggering:
  – 13k servers were running few months ago, and analysts say the company will need 50k next year.
  – $1m monthly electricity bill
  – another $500k per month for bandwidth
  – 2TBs of data (mostly photos) uploaded every day require the purchase of one NetApp 3070 each week
  – maintaining this infrastructure requires a big staff, costing about $80m a year.

  In other words, Facebook is burning cash. What about the coal? A shrinking supply of ads, ignorance of the target group (how often do you click on a banner?) As a result, the financial community keeps raising questions."

• There’s no escape from Georgina Downs, the poisoned ‘Pesticide Nun’ | Times Online – "Junior ministers were generally supportive of Downs’s campaign, but getting policy changed required the support of the environment secretary. So she approached David Miliband, now the foreign secretary. “He turned me down twice in writing, so I went to a conference and got him coming out of the loo. I told him my name and said he’d refused to meet me twice and I wanted to know why.

  “At first he looked confused but the third time I asked, he said, ‘Georgina, if there was a reason to meet you, I would have met you’ – or words to that effect. He was very arrogant.”

  She had no greater success with Hilary Benn, the current secretary of state."