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:

• Media advocacy and the media war | SderotMedia.com – Israeli citizen journalism: "The Difficulties presenting the tragedy in Sderot when comparing the statistics from Gaza. The media does not highlight the fact that most of these children where killed when they were acting as human shields for terrorist groups.

  According to the Israeli Air Force Commander, 97 percent of rockets, missiles, and mortars that are being launched and fired towards Israel, by the Hamas and Palestinian militia terrorist organizations- are being fired from among the civilian population in Gaza, hiding and assimilated from within the residential homes, neighborhood and family homes.

  The international media will only cover the situation in Sderot when there is death and serious injury–when it bleeds, it leads–the psychological damage is difficult to present in the media and is largely ignore.

  Media coverage=> => sympathy for the Palestinian cause=> legitimacy for terrorism."

• Newspaper tax increases in Lithuania | Newspaper Innovation – Total circulation of paid papers in Lithuania has decreased sharply in the last decade. Ten years ago it was around 2.5 million. In 2007 it was just over 500,000.
• Government aid could save U.S. newspapers, spark debate | Reuters – Connecticut does not see trying to find a buyer and offering tax breaks as exerting influence on the press, said Joan McDonald, the economic development commissioner.

  "It is what we do … with companies whether it's in aerospace, biomedical devices, biotech or financial services," she said. "If a company is developing laser technology, we don't get into the business of what lasers are used for."

  Connecticut's actions are not the first time government has helped newspapers. The U.S. Postal Service has offered discounted postage rates. Several cities have papers running under Joint Operating Agreements, created following the congressional Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 to keep competing urban dailies viable despite circulation declines.

• Groundhog Day For Melanie Phillips: The Fifth Column Of Malice | The Spectator – "The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda and thus inciting yet more to join the murderous rampage against Israel as well as ratcheting up the pressure on world leaders to force Israel to stop before Hamas is destroyed.

  Isn’t there a case for legal action against these media outlets on account of their blood libels, for indirectly aiding the perpetrators of attempted genocide?" I don't think so, but I don't want to disagree for fear of being labelled a blood libelling etc.

• What I learned in my first blogging year | Kirk Lapointe – It has been one year since I started www.themediamanager.com. Time for some reflection on what it has taught and changed in me.
• Chess is now a young man’s game | Marginal Revolution – [T]he more exact a "science" the game becomes, the smaller is the value of accumulated experience relative to sheer skill.
• Using WordPress.com with new Dashboard | Teaching Online Journalism – Just what it says…
• Looking for good news | yelvington.com – "The true number of in-market users who consume pages with enough frequency to be affected by an advertising campaign is distressingly low.

  At the core, it’s not an advertising problem. Local businesses still need to reach potential local customers, and they’re willing (although certainly not eager) to pay for results.

  It’s primarily a failure to attract and retain a commercially relevant audience that’s breaking the newspaper business model."

• Refuted economic doctrines #1: The efficient markets hypothesis | John Quiggin – The dotcom bubble was just one component of a massive asset price bubble that began in the early 1990s and is only now coming to an end. Throughout this period, patterns of savings and investment made little sense. Household savings plunged to zero and below in a number of developed countries (including nearly all English-speaking countries) and the resulting current account deficits were met by borrowing from rapidly growing poor countries like China (standard economics would suggest that capital flows should go in the other direction). The massive growth of the financial sector itself, which accounted for nearly half of all corporate profits by the end of the bubble, diverted physical and particularly human capital from the production of goods and services.
  Once the EMH is abandoned, it seems likely that markets will do better than governments in planning investments in some cases (those where a good judgement of consumer demand is important, for example) and worse in others…