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:

• Numbers Show Newspapers Heading for Demise | eMarketer – The newspaper industry, which is pinning its hopes for the future on following readers online, is in trouble. Online ad revenues are dropping as well. eMarketer estimates online newspaper ad revenues declined by 0.4% in 2008 to $3.15 billion.

  eMarketer projects online newspaper ad revenues growth to drop in 2009 by 4.7% to $3.01 billion. The recession, the dismal state of the newspaper industry and the quarterly online ad spending trends for 2008 all factor into these projections.

• ICC Silliness Watch — Non-Media Edition | Opinio Juris – [E]ven if Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza — and I certainly believe it has — the ICC does not have jurisdiction over them … Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute.  To be sure, Israel could accept the ICC’s jurisdiction ad hoc or the Security Council could refer the situation in Gaza to the Court (as suggested by the International Federation for Human Rights).  But we all know how likely those scenarios are.

  Seriously, guys, read the Rome Statute.

• INFO MINISTRY DENIES PAYING JOURNALISTS COVERING BY-ELECTION – Yahoo! Malaysia News – Another business model for journalism: "The Information Ministry today denied making any payment to journalists covering the Kuala Terengganu parliamentary by-election, polling for which is tomorrow."
• Lebedev and The Evening Standard | FT.com – Another vanity publisher is the last thing the newspaper sector needs. Alexander Lebedev, the wealthy former KGB agent, is close to buying one of the most influential London titles from DMGT. Owning the Evening Standard, he correctly surmises, will be “a good way to waste money”. This is a paper that could lose £15m-20m at the operating level this year. If he hopes owning a trophy asset will confer compensating non-cash benefits – influence, glamour and prestige – he may be disappointed. That type of money can buy lobbyists-a-dozen and acres of advertorial. Either way, such determination to bankroll a zombie business bodes ill for profit-oriented rivals hoping to eke some small change out of their own titles.
• Hamas and Israel fight a media war too: a war of words and images | The Economist – Israel’s campaign has succeeded on the home front, with its own Jewish citizens remaining broadly enthusiastic about a war mostly portrayed in admiring terms. It has conquered the American House of Representatives, too, which voted on January 9th by 390-5 for a bill declaring “unwavering commitment” to Israel. And it has even won over Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, an American everyman who won brief celebrity in the presidential campaign for his forthright views as “Joe the Plumber”. Dispatched by Pajamas TV to report from Israel, he declared that its ban on war coverage was a good thing.

  Yet wider support among the American public for Israel in this conflict appears to be less robust than usual. A Rasmussen poll taken on December 31st showed that while 44% of Americans were still for Israel, 41% were against it, a relatively high figure. And that was before the bloody attack on a UN school and other such incidents.

• Times of London plagiarizing? | Megan McArdle – I came across this totally randomly – linked to the Elmer-DeWitt account to explain his 9 month dalliance with alternative therapies, then googled for updated news, and thought:  "Wait a minute, I've read this somewhere before".  It's possible that this is not plagiarism–that David Rose is actually Philip Elmer-DeWitt's alter ego and thus owns the copyright to that passage, or that Mr Rose meant to attribute the passage and the html somehow got screwed up.
• Could It Be That Free Is Just Fine Until There Is A Big Breaking Story And Then We’ll Cough Up The Money To Buy The Better Journalism In A Paid-For Newspaper? | FollowThe Media – What The Sun and The Daily Mirror learned during 2007 was that when they had really good stories, exclusives or blanket coverage of an event of great interest then their circulation rose – witness their coverage of the McCann kidnap story and the return by Iran of the UK sailors taken prisoner. When they have a big story money seems no object — they spend what it takes.
  The problem is there are far more slow news days than there are good news days. The tabloids have never recovered from losing Princess Diana. Her picture every day on the front page guaranteed loyal readers. No one has taken her place.