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:

• Remember this day | Dadblog – The awful stuff coming out of Mumbai is one thing, but here’s another: the Indian government asking for live Twitter updates to cease to protect their operations. For all sorts of reasons, this seems to be significant.
• Mumbai terrorist attacks show that search engines still can’t get breaking news right | currybet – "We are used to hearing that search engines are one of the primary routes that people find news on the net, but I've just been having a scout around the three major search engines as news of the terrorist attack in Mumbai unfolds, and I have to say that they are not performing very well."
• Death watch: tangible media | JD Lasica – "The big takeaway from the dotcom meltdown of 2001-2002 is this: The public's habits change slooooooowly. We haven't abandoned Target and Macy's and Toys R Us to do all our shopping online. But we are buying more of our stuff there. The same will hold true for tangible media. We're at the start of a transition to the digital world, but it will be slow and, for many companies, painful."
• The financial meltdown is an academic crisis too | vox – "What we have witnessed in recent months is not only the fracturing of the world’s financial system but the discrediting of an academic discipline. There are some 4,000 university finance professors worldwide, thousands of finance research papers are published each year, and yet there have been few if any warnings from the academic community of the incendiary potential of global financial markets. Is it too harsh to conclude that despite the considerable academic resources that go into finance research our understanding of the behaviour of financial markets is no greater than it was in 1929/33 or indeed 1720?"
• B-grade managers and on-line trash: Oz media at work | Crikey – "Ivor Ries, head of research for EL&C Baillieu Stockbroking, and former Chanticleer columnist with the Australian Financial Review predicted that the latest round of redundancies will be far from the last at Fairfax. "They will keep cutting and keep cutting until they disappear up their own a-sehole."

  And earlier he said: "Most of the major media companies are incompetent in making the transition” to new media. They had assigned “the B team” to their online productions and where “nowhere near exploiting their content properly."

  He went on: "Most of the media organisations in Australia have B and C grade managers. They are not good businesspeople."

  As for Fairfax’s strategy of having a "tabloid" character online and a "quality" character in print form: "They're trying to talk to advertisers and say that they are talking to all these BMW drivers, and then they have all this poor white trash content online."

• Bail Me Out, Mr. Paulson | PJ O’Rourke – "We print journalists are victims of economic forces beyond our control. We were as surprised as everyone else was by the sudden collapse of the reliable reporting market. We had no idea that real news and clear-eyed analysis were being "bundled" with subprime celebrity gossip, US Weekly derivatives, and Jennifer Aniston/Angelina Jolie swaps. We need a swift infusion of federal aid. Otherwise all the information in America will be about Lindsay Lohan's sex life."
• Al Jazeera’s citizen journalism project | yelvington.com – "Mohamed Nanabhay's new-media crew at Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic satellite TV network, has launched a citizen-journalism upload portal, seeking eyewitness news reports from its vast international audience."
• Scope, Completeness, and Accuracy of Drug Information in Wikipedia (December) — Clauson et al., 10.1345/aph.1L474 | The Annals of Pharmacotherapy – RESULTS: Wikipedia was able to answer significantly fewer drug information questions (40.0%) compared with MDR (82.5%; p < 0.001). Wikipedia performed poorly regarding information on dosing, with a score of 0% versus the MDR score of 90.0%. Answers found in Wikipedia were 76.0% complete, while MDR provided answers that were 95.5% complete; overall, Wikipedia answers were less complete than those in Medscape (p < 0.001). No factual errors were found in Wikipedia, whereas 4 answers in Medscape conflicted with the answer key; errors of omission were higher in Wikipedia (n = 48) than in MDR (n = 14). There was a marked improvement in Wikipedia over time, as current entries were superior to those 90 days prior (p = 0.024).

  CONCLUSIONS: Wikipedia has a more narrow scope, is less complete, and has more errors of omission than the comparator database. Wikipedia may be a useful point of engagement for consumers, but is not authoritative and should only be a supplemental source of drug informat

• The strange decline of The Economist | Dadblog – "Increasingly, The Economist resembles a very high-end version of The Week – a compendium of international news aimed at the international traveller with little time for the detail and an hour in the airport to fill. This may be sufficient for the non-executive chairman who doesn’t really need to, you know, understand stuff. For the rest of us, Robert Peston’s blog has got more meat on it than the Economist. Oh dear."