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:

• Secret deal secures BBC cash until 2033 | Times Online – To fund the redevelopment, the BBC decided in 2003 to tap the bond market for the first time. Although the £813m 30- year bond was not guaranteed by the government, the BBC was given an AA credit rating.

  According to Dyke, Jowell’s written assurances over the future of the BBC helped secure the deal. “When we were getting the bond we had to get an assurance from the secretary of state that the BBC will still be around,” he said.

  “We had to agree a wording to make sure it looked like the BBC will still be properly funded. It basically said that it is our [the government's] belief that the BBC will still be there and still be funded by 2030.”

• It’s over | Mahmood’s Den – Mahmood ran a damn fine blog: "Over the last few years of active blogging, and BBSing and other forms of electronic communication since 1986, I have decided to stop active blogging and would like to thank everyone for their friendship, support, suggestions and comments."
• Does the SEC Do Quantitative Research? | The Big Picture – There is little evidence that the SEC is using any of the quantitative methods — now so common on Wall Street — for searching out and identifying fraud.

  I would suggest to the incoming head of the SEC to put together a blue ribbon of math professors, quant scientists and algo specialists to develop a few basic programs that ferrets thru market, options, and perfromance data looking for aberrational data series, and leading to criminals and fraud artists.

• Elton John v Guardian News & Media Ltd [2008] EWHC 3066 (QB) (12 Dec 2008) – # Irony is not always a form of sarcasm or ridicule, although it is often used in that way. It is the Defendant's case that that is what it is in the present case. The Claimant accepts that the words complained of are obviously an attempt at humour, as well as being a snide attack on the Claimant. Nevertheless, his case is also that the reasonable reader could understand the words complained of to be statements of fact about the Claimant. As he puts it, the device is to take factual matters and put words into the Claimant's mouth to reveal his true attitude.

  # It is the Defendant's submission that the words complained of are obviously not attributing to the Claimant statements that could be understood as factual statements whether by him or about him. Rather, not only is the attribution transparently false, but the relevant statements which appear to be of fact are transparently not so.

• Tough Times For News Nonprofits | Forbes.com – "Philanthropy requires impact, and impact often requires scale," says NPR chief Haarsager. While a small nonprofit news organization may be able to convince an organization of its value once or twice, he predicts doing it regularly will be tough.
• How to launch rockets with Dapper and Yahoo Pipes | Scrollin’ on Dubs – The problem we’ll solve in the next 18 min: there’s currently no easy way to subscribe to the 200+ local bloggers listed on Read Phoenix (short of visiting each blog and sub’ing the RSS feeds individually). In this tutorial we’ll build an app from start to finish that spiders the list of bloggers on that site, grabs the latest posts from each blog and provides a single, chronologically-sorted master feed of the most recent posts and filtering out auto-generated bookmark posts.
• The Platform: Beyond the Great Press Crash of 2008 | The Century Foundation – [H]ere, in the briefest of summaries, are avenues for innovation:

  1. Reestablish the principle that news has to be paid for by someone: the consumer, the advertiser, or the distributor. (See the Platform for November 3, 2008: “Make Google Pay.”)

  2. Private equity investment in new brands or renewed confidence in such stalwarts as the New York Times and the Washington Post, which are hurting badly but would revive if they can make money from others (for example, search engines) through fees for their content.

  3. Accept the role of news as a public service to be supported by the community through public funds, membership, and sponsorship of various kinds. This is, of course, the model that has been in place for decades at public radio and PBS.

• The paradox of better screening | Healthcare Economist – Does better screening lead to improvements in health outcomes? Conventional wisdom holds that this is always true. For instance, catching breast cancer at an early stage greatly improves survival probabilities. However, early screening can lead to a statistical anomaly where better screening appears to improve mortality rates even when treatments are entirely ineffective.
• Writing for the web: What belongs in the online style guide? | Martin Stabe – While there plenty of good guides to writing for the web, there are few specifically written as reference documents for reporters and subeditors in news organisations.

  The BBC, Economist, Guardian, Observer, Telegraph and Times all have their style guides online. Somewhat remarkably, though, none of these documents seem to have a section on writing for the web and how its conventions sometimes has to be differ from the conventions of print journalism.

• The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems | Wikileaks – At a theoretical level, the Human Terrain project is reliant on a form of social engineering where the anthropologists working inside the program seem to believe they are reducing harm for the studied occupied populations, but the program itself is designed to manipulate these populations as studied objects—objects to be controlled for what has been determined as “their own good.”
• Advice for the jobless | Still A Newspaperman – I have been laid off twice in my career and fired once. In October, I laid myself off, throwing my future into the same dismal job market.

  Of course, I am occasionally discouraged. But I remain optimistic that there is a bright future for professional journalists in this country and that journalists, not corporate bean counters or vision-deprived publishers, will be the ones to find the way.

  Meanwhile, I do have some advice for my fellow unemployed journalists based on my own experience and observations