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:

• Ofcom PSB review – what will happen? | Ofcomwatch – Ofcom and the government are choking television from three sides:  (i) state ownership and its accompanying inefficiencies, patronage and regulatory capture; (ii) outdated mandates that specify quotas and certain content that must be provided; and (iii) numerous illegal and financially harmful advertising restrictions.
• Newspapers turn into rich mens’ toys | FT.com – The $5.6bn Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp paid in 2007 for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal and several local papers, would now be sufficient to buy Gannett, the New York Times, McClatchy, Media General, Belo and Lee Enterprises, even at twice their current share prices. The Dow Jones titles are now supported by more stable cable channels and film studio revenues, just as the Washington Post is protected by the far larger income its parent company makes from its Kaplan education arm.
• Brit journalists who understand US politics | The Daily Novel – I omitted to mention in my blog this morning on Jim Naughtie’s eloquent curtain raiser from Washington on the Inauguaration, that Naughtie has told me several times how much he owes his understanding of US politics and US journalism to the Laurence Stern Fellowship hosted by City University, London. Naughtie was the second winner (in 1981) of this fellowship which sends a young British journalist to work at the Washington Post for three months each summer.

  Another grateful fellow (1992) is Jonathan Freedland, a columnist on The Guardian, who wrote that newspaper’s splash this morning, ‘Magical spell that will open new American era’. It is the kind of headline that makes professional journalists despair of The Guardian; it would be a rotten headline even on the features pages.

  But, presumably, that headline was written by a sub-editor.

• Correcting an Error about Dopamine Signaling | Pure Pedantry – if I give you a cookie that you didn't expect one morning, you are like "Nice!  Free cookie."  You release dopamine.  In contrast, if I give you a cookie every morning for several weeks, this cookie has become a predicted reward; hence there is no further release of dopamine. Dopamine release would change if you expected to get a cookie every morning and I didn't give you one.  This would be an omitted expected reward, and it would cause a reduction in dopamine release.

  The reason that dopamine functions in this way is because it trains your behavioral responses… The dopamine is released in areas of the brain such as the striatum and frontal cortex that function in decision making.  The computation that these regions make is that whatever the activity was when the dopamine was released, well, let's do more of that because it was rewarding.  Whatever you are doing when the dopamine was released, let's do that again.

• The White House Has a New Webmaster | Valleywag – The first blog post of the Obama Administration promises "communication," "transparency," and "participation." It does not allow comments.
• Saucy study reveals a gene that affects aggression after provocation | Not Exactly Rocket Science – Many studies tend to focus on "altruistic punishment", where people take a personal hit to punish others for the good of the group. But in this experiment, those who paid to punish received no returns on their "investment" – they were acting out of spite, which McDermott describes as the "neglected ugly sister of altruism".

  Spite has been investigated recently in a study which showed that students from 16 cities around the world varied greatly in their tendency to punish others spitefully or "antisocially". That study attributed the differences to how the various societies felt about free-loading and how strongly respected the rule of law. But it would be equally interesting to see if the low activity version of MAOA was more common in some of these countries than in others.

• Let’s talk about the economics of great journalism | RatcliffeBlog – Having been in and around journalism, citizen journalism and publishing for a long time, let me suggest we stop talking about the ethics of providing complete and useful information to citizens of a democracy, which are barely changed by the requirements of social media and cloud computing technology, in isolation from the economics of journalism. If someone delivers great journalism on a regular basis, what does it cost to do it? What is it worth to you to get better news coverage of an important issue?
  Let’s posit that if the journalism is “great” or even “good,” it will be ethical, and face the problem of paying for the change we want.