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:

• Why I stay | John Robinson – With the recent buyouts, I've been asked more often than I like why I didn't apply. After all, the severance package was generous. The easy answer is also the true answer: I love what we do. If you believe, as I do, that the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing then no other job will do. The ability, the responsibility to pursue the truth as part of informing and nourishing a democratic society is a powerful motivator.
• Talking Business – Avoiding a Financial Collapse, Indian-Style | NYTimes.com – [W]hen I went to see Deepak Parekh, the chief executive of HDFC, which was founded in 1977 as the country’s first specialized mortgage bank, practically the first words out of his mouth were these: “We don’t do interest-only or subprime loans. When the bubble was going on, we did not change any of our policies. We did not change any of our systems. We did not change our thought process. We never gave more money to a borrower because the value of the house had gone up. Citibank has a few home equity loans, but most banks in India don’t make those kinds of loans. Our nonperforming loans are less than 1 percent.”
• I Want My Rocky – We meet in this strange place in a noble effort to save the Rocky Mountain News. And if we can’t save the Rocky, we can, at minimum, make some noise before we go. Since the day the proposed sale of the Rocky was announced, we’ve been waiting for the odd billionaire to join our cause. This may surprise you, but none has come forward. Apparently Phil and Tim and Pat and the rest of the team must have misplaced our e-mail address. So, we turn now to the non-billionaires. We think there may be more of you.
• Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II :| CJR – I think, essentially, to get the right mix of both publicly subsidized—not just in terms of money but also publicly supported in terms of time—journalistic organizations is really going to take a catastrophe. Because I don’t trust the current generation of newspapers to actually mean what they say when they talk about civic mission, because none of them are saying, “We were in a hurry to get out from under this poor-profit model that’s preventing us from living up to that civic function.” All they’re really saying is, “If we’re saying ‘civic function’ often enough, somebody ought to throw us a bailout,” which, you know, is no different from what GM is doing, which might be what I did if I were a CEO of a newspaper.
• The Death Throes of Print? | Jason Santa Maria – Competition makes for innovation. Without the print edition to serve as the flagship product, the website will no longer be a second class citizen or a quaint add-on to a business model; it will become the business model. Companies will need to rethink their strategies and goals for the web, and ways to distinguish themselves. If a publication or a few happen to break out of the current mold and start innovating, this may cause other publications, whether still maintaining print editions or not, to become competitive online as well.
• Why Netbooks Are Greener Than Laptops | GigaOM – The vast majority of netbooks are powered by Intel’s Atom processor, an energy-efficient chip inside of the laptops listed with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program. How efficient is it? Atom sports a maximum thermal design point (TDP) of 2.5 watts; compare that with Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips, which have a TDP of 65 watts.