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:

• Wolff: Murdoch ‘absolutely despises’ O’Reilly | Politico.com – “It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."

  “The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”

• The Benefits of Computer-Assisted Reporting | Nieman Reports – "Spreadsheets, databases and online services such as LexisNexis offer immediate help for even the most pressing deadline stories. Classic programs for CAR practitioners, like SPSS and the ArcView mapping program, offer sophisticated analysis for a relatively modest price. There is an investment of time required to learn, but it can pay immediate dividends.

  Whether the story is about real estate, foster care for children, school performance, taxes, government bureaucracy, or even Mother’s Day, there are numbers and records that can be analyzed with tools that have been around for more than a decade. CAR gives journalists the opportunity to dig for truth in data, and the comparative analysis that a computer can do often reveals pertinent questions. What reporters are able to learn from using CAR provides readers with knowledge and insights that can cut through the clutter of opinionated noise and celebrity obsession."

• Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? | Robert Nozick – It is not simply formal schools but formal schooling in a specified social context that produces anti-capitalist animus in (wordsmith) intellectuals. No doubt, the hypothesis requires further refining. But enough. It is time to turn the hypothesis over to the social scientists, to take it from armchair speculations in the study and give it to those who will immerse themselves in more particular facts and data. We can point, however, to some areas where our hypothesis might yield testable consequences and predictions. First, one might predict that the more meritocratic a country's school system, the more likely its intellectuals are to be on the left. (Consider France.) Second, those intellectuals who were "late bloomers" in school would not have developed the same sense of entitlement to the very highest rewards; therefore, a lower percentage of the late-bloomer intellectuals will be anti-capitalist than of the early bloomers. Third, we limited our hypothesis to those societies (unlike
• Hulu Users Choose Two Minute Ads | SIA – "88% of Hulu viewers are opting to view a two-minute advertisement in exchange for no ads during the rest of the show."
• Gaming the next pandemic | CNET News – "[T]he Department of Defense (DOD) has commissioned the development of a simulation-based planning and training software application, a game in other words – albeit a "serious" one – to help it to prepare for the next influenza pandemic.
• Ramifications of the Independent-Mail link | Roy Greenslade – Today's announcement of a partnership between Independent News & Media and the Daily Mail & General Trust is hugely significant, and could have implications far beyond their British titles sharing a headquarters.
• James Cameron in The Guardian today | John Slattery – The great journalist James Cameron knew my father. He was his doctor. James wrote a wonderful column about my dad Jerry Slattery when he died, which The Guardian has re-published here today as the archive piece on its leader page. It was a bit of a shock to read it again more than 30 years later. I hope they are sharing a whisky somewhere.