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:

• Journalists are biggest terrorists: Zardari | PakTribune – President Asif Zardari seems to be so unhappy with the media that he told a delegation of businessmen from the NWFP recently that journalists were the biggest terrorists in Pakistan.
  Members of the delegation of the Sarhad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (SCCI), which met the president on January 15, quoted him as saying that journalists misreported things and presented the situation in a non-objective manner. They said the president felt the media should be careful in its handling of sensitive issues….A PPP leader, who for obvious reasons wished not to be named, confirmed that the president did make the statement about journalists being terrorists.
• Peter Preston: Sorting through a pile of roubles | The Guardian – It matters hugely to Lebedev whether he has to compete against the Lite and Murdoch's thelondonpaper. (The signs are that he will.) It matters hugely to Associated to know whether a Lebedev Standard would turn itself into a morning paper, competing directly with the Mail and Metro. It matters personally to Rothermere to understand whether selling the Standard would also hand Wapping victory in the freesheet wars. It matters mightily to James Murdoch to understand whether the Lebedev deal would destroy any immediate prospect of News International winning a chunk of the Standard in an eventual peace deal. Everything connects.
• Do Newsmags Still Matter? | Howard Kurtz – US News Magazines – sweatershops: "Meacham, wearing a dark sweater in his office overlooking Central Park, says that "we don't edit with the idea that there is a poor and uninformed reader out there who somehow needs illumination." He sees his audience as "the virtual Beltway," which he defines as people who watch Sunday talk shows, read newspapers and buy hardcover books.

  Stengel, wearing a dark sweater in his office with a view of the Hudson River, says his philosophy, especially online, is "news for smart people. . . . We are arguably the best-known news brand in the world, and we want to leverage that."

• If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code | Charles on… anything that comes along – My coding? Not that great. Your coding? Could be a lot better. Great coding? You’d be able to knock up something like the Guardian BNP map without a second thought. And the journalism then flows on from that, because you can see so much more clearly. If you’re tracking the data, you’ll be able to see when something changes, when something unusual happens.

  None of which is saying you shouldn’t be talking to your sources, and questioning what you’re told, and trying to find other means of finding stuff out from people. But nowadays, computers are a sort of primary source too. You’ve got to learn to interrogate them effectively – and quote them meaningfully – too.

• China Exports Will Be Gone for a While | Diligence China – My brother buys chemicals in China and processes them for sale to manufacturers in the US, Europe and parts of Latam.  

  He tells me that Chinese suppliers have a problem.  In the run-up to the Olympics, Chinese sellers of chemicals were pushing everything they could out the door at shortage-level prices because they were facing shutdowns to help improve Beijing air quality.  Now my brother’s warehouse in New Jersey is full of raw materials – bought at a high price in the first half of this year.  He can’t move his existing inventory because downstream demand is dead.  Lately he’s started getting calls from Chinese suppliers who are trying to get him to buy more by slashing their prices.   He just laughs at them, because they are the same guys who jammed tons of high-priced goods on him when the market was running high.

• How to sustain public service television | FT.com – Bring a shotgun, there's going to be a wedding: "Simply allowing Channel 4 to carry on as before but with the injection of public money does not resolve structural issues. What is needed is a solution that has a long-term industrial logic while preparing both channels for the “any time anywhere” personalised digital world.

  That solution could be a merger between Channel 4 and Five. With this merger, the future of both as public service channels with their own identities would be guaranteed, delivering real benefits to the public while standing on their own two feet commercially. It would also lead to a more balanced television landscape – but one that would still be far more diversified than any other in Europe."