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:

• Who will mourn local newspapers? | FT.com – There used to be a logic to the Chicago Tribune or the Miami Herald having large Washington bureaux and even foreign correspondents. People who lived in those places could not access The New York Times or The Washington Post online and relied instead on the local paper.

  These days, they can do so free, which eliminates the need for a lot of coverage to be duplicated. Aggregation sites such as Google News have shone a harsh spotlight on the overlap and repetition in national coverage in hundreds of newspapers.

  I am sure US citizens would lose something if fewer papers or wire services covered national affairs. But would it really be insufficient for society if five or six organisations (including Reuters and Bloomberg) competed to cover, for example, the Federal Reserve? I doubt it.

  The question for national and international reporting is not whether city papers survive but whether news organisations such as The New York Times do. Clearly, if they did not, and blogs were left alone t

• Granted, Gov. Blagojevich is a sleaze, but how solid is the government’s case? | Jack Shafer – Before we turn down the sheets on Blagojevich's prison cot, let's see transcripts of him actually making a money deal or power deal with somebody for the Senate seat. Even U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald says his office isn't "trying to criminalize people making political horse trades on policies or that sort of thing."

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  As for other possibly criminal conduct by Blagojevich—such as attempting to shake down corporations for campaign contributions in return for state funding—he appears oblivious to how easy it is to legally swap political favors for position, power, and money. And for that ignorance the governor has my complete sympathy.

• World’s Richest Journalism Prize Offered for Environmental Reporting – "Entries are now invited for the largest journalism cash award in the world – $75,000 from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
  Reports entered to win the Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment must cover environment and/or natural resources topics and be originally published or broadcast in the United States or Canada between January 1 and December 31, 2008, in print, broadcast, online, or book formats."
• Writing on the wall for newspapers | FT.com – "[P]ublishers need to look closely at how their print and online customers vary. If “online only” cannot be made to work financially, a newspaper’s online presence may need to be reduced significantly to encourage people back to the physical product.

  Japan’s newspapers have restricted their web presence and titles have suffered a smaller decline in readership and advertising than North American and European peers, says the report."

• Into the dark night that is very, very long… | Adam Macqueen – For all of us children: "Then, one day, the king rose from his seat as if to go down to his castle. The people watching him saw him shake and stagger and fall to the ground. The king was dead. Great was the sadness and loud the wailing. The flags on the houses were pulled to half mast and the great bell rang."
• MapReduce: Google’s Secret Weapon | HBS – MapReduce is opening the door to the analysis of vast amounts of information–from terabytes of data on the voting habits of Americans, to the fluctuations of billions of individual airline fares, to scores of terabytes of health data. This will change the landscape of virtually everything we do. "The biggest challenge of the Petrabyte Age won't be storing all the data," Wired magazine noted recently, "but figuring out how to make sense of it." Making sense of it: That is where the brain behind the Internet is now heading.