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:

• The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers | Boing Boing – It didn't take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the printing press into a latter-day steam engine.

  And once that became obvious, we said so, over and over again, all the time. We said it in public, we said it in private. We said it when newspapers hired us as designers, we said it when we were brought in as consultants, we said it for free. We were some tiresome motherfuckers with all our talk about the end of news on paper. And you know what? The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us.

• News Media Less Effective at Conveying Ad Messages | Marketing Charts – "Only 28% of the audience of an average news program, website or magazine gets valuable information about products and services advertised there, making news venues less effective at conveying ad messages than all forms of media combined, according to consumer research from Experian Simmons."
• A hunch that failed to pay off | FT.com – Newspapers which once aspired to Pulitzer prizes for their international or financial reporting are now looking at outsourcing foreign or business desks to wire services such as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, to focus on areas in which they can be specialists, such as local news.

  Other profit-boosting initiatives included using newspaper brands to drive ancillary revenue such as the income News Corp’s British papers generate from bingo and wine sales.

  Tribune’s discussions with the owners of the Orange County Register, and the Las Vegas Sun’s agreement to share print distribution with a local rival highlight a new willingness to consider cost-saving consolidation or once unthinkable alliances.

  Such deals will depend, however, on financing and on regulators loosening rules.

  Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal now advising private equity investors, says: “Several private equity firms have asked should they be investing in newspapers. What I now tell them is

• Kill the Media Zombies | The Daily Beast – In his fascinating piece about Dr. Samuel Johnson in last week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik evoked the cultural and economic forces at work in London in the 1730s as: “the old-media dispensation in crisis and the new media hardly paying.” Sound familiar? In Johnson’s day, writes Gopnik, “The practice of aristocratic patronage, in which big shots paid to be flattered by their favorite writers, was ebbing, and the new, middle-class arrangement, where plays and novels could command real money, was not yet in place.” Let the good times roll.
• The Britishisms Are Coming! | CJR – English – our gift to the world…
• Newspapers Aren’t Dying, Advertising Models Are | Francine Hardaway – You can talk all you want about how news is shifting online, how young people don't read, how bureaus are shutting down, how great reporting is dying. The fact of the matter is, it has never been about news. It has always been about advertising. Where will people tolerate advertising? Where will they hear it or look at it? It's a constant battle between the consumer's distaste for interruption and the need to sell products.

  As urban areas grew and literacy grew with them, advertisers figured out that there was an aggregation here that they could use to announce and sell products.

  Well, now there's a new kind of aggregation and a new kind of literacy, and it is taking place online. Good reporting will eventually happen online, because people are aggregating there. The first newspapers weren't very good either–they were  sensationalist–like, say, The Drudge Report.