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:

• Kiddie-porn scandal lands Wikipedia a British ban [The Sum Of All Human Knowledge] | Valleywag – "The Wikipedian child-porn fetish is disturbing. But it's a sign of a much deeper problem. Wikipedia editors love to make up bureaucratic rules. It's part of what makes the site so intimidating to new users, and why bias and misreporting so often go uncorrected on the site. Knowledgeable people are scared away by the need to engage in time-wasting arguments with bored teenagers and obsessive Internet users for whom enforcing these rules is a source of cheap entertainment."
• British ISPs filtering Wikipedia | CNET News – Internet service providers in the U.K. have begun filtering access to Wikipedia after the site was added to the Internet Watch Foundation's blacklist.

  The following notice appeared on Wikipedia on Saturday when many UK users attempted to edit content:
  Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.

• The Medium – Content and Its Discontents | NYTimes.com – In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to “tell great stories” or “make arresting images.” You don’t study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an “article” is understood mostly as a delivery vehicle for pictures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under certain kinds of headlines that also adhere to strict conventions as to size and tone, and eventually they appear alongside certain kinds of photos and illustrations with certain kinds of captions on pages of certain dimensions that are often shared with advertisements.
• PA bars Al-Jazeera journalists from Mukata | Middle East | Jerusalem Post – "The Palestinian Authority has decided to ban a number of journalists from entering the presidential Mukata compound in Ramallah.

  Abbas waves to the crowd before a speech in the Mukata in Ramallah.

  The decision is aimed at punishing the journalists because of their criticism of the PA leadership or for reporting about the activities of Hamas leaders.

  Al-Jazeera reporters and TV crews are among those who now appear on the PA's blacklist. They have been denied access to the Mukata for the past two weeks.

  Other journalists working for Arab and Western media outlets have also been told that they are no longer welcome to visit the compound.

• What’s going on here then? | StreetWire (beta) – A new idea for aggregating local info…
• 4IP: The first project is out, and it’s a football community tool | The Guardian – Good for Rick: "The first project in Channel 4's 4IP scheme rolled out quietly today without much fanfare, but perhaps the broadcaster feels this isn't the right time to be blowing the trumpet about a £60m innovation fund. Still, 4IP is starting to support some interesting and experimental digital media projects and as backing from venture capital and angel investors dries up, the project is going to become an extremely valuable resource for the startup community.

  First off the blocks is #FC, a community conversation tool for football clubs that uses the messaging platforms Twitter and Jaiku. The mastermind is Rick Waghorn, subject of yesterday's Elevator Pitch for his 'Addiply' local advertising platform, with some support from former IPC music journalists and web producer Neil Mason."

• The Bailout Paradox | Robert Reich – "As a condition of getting a federal bailout, the Big Three are promising, among other things, to cut costs. Among the costs to be cut will be jobs. This is paradoxical, since the reason Congress is considering bailing them out in the first place is to preserve jobs and avoid the social costs of large-scale job loss (unemployment insurance, lost tax revenues, pension payments that have to be picked up by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, and so forth)."