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:

• A crime paper flourishes by printing mug shots | csmonitor.com – At a time when dozens of US newspapers are searching for buyers and for cash, The Slammer’s newsstand profit margin is four times that of most local dailies, and its circulation has grown to 29,000 – up nearly 50 percent from 20,000 just last year. At more than 500 convenience stores across North Carolina, it’s selling at a buck a pop.

  In fact, the chief complaints the weekly paper gets come from perps complaining that their photos didn’t get printed. In February, the paper will expand its operations from three major North Carolina counties – including the cities of Charlotte, Raleigh, and Durham – to add Columbus, Ohio.

• Service Scripting: A Customer’s Perspective of Quality and Performance | Cornell – Many hospitality services are scripted, under the theory that scripts are an efficient method of ensuring a consistent level of service quality… As a starting point, this study found that customers are able to detect when scripts are in use in both kinds of interactions… For the standardized interaction, respondents to this study reported no difference in their perceptions of service quality regardless of whether the scenario was highly scripted, moderately scripted, or relaxed (essentially, improvised). In contrast, for the concierge service, respondents perceived that a heavy use of scripting diminished service quality. At the same time, a moderate or relaxed approach to scripting for the customized concierge scenarios had no effect on respondents’ perception of service quality. This study suggests that hotel managers should be circumspect in scripting customized encounters, but may apply scripts to standardized services without diminishing perceptions of service quality.
• Early to the game but late to learn how to play | Yelvington – While we were building Star Tribune Online, we went from one or two to about a hundred local mom-and-pop Internet service providers. We tried to convert STO into an ISP, running Netscape on top of the Interchange client, but it was too late.

  The Web had arrived, pathetic and weak but open and extensible.

  Many of us who were there at the time knew that human interaction, not newspaper reading, would be the most powerful motivator of online usage. Certainly I knew it; I had run a dialup bulletin board for years as a hobby. But as hundreds of newspapers rushed to "go online," few even bothered to ask basic questions about content strategy. It was, many declared as if they were saying something wise, "just another edition."

  But it's not.

• End Times | The Atlantic – If 80 percent of the NYT staff ends up laid off, many of them won’t find their way to new reporting jobs. But over the long run, a world in which journalism is no longer weighed down by the need to fold an omnibus news product into a larger lifestyle-tastic package might turn out to be one in which actual reportage could make the case for why it matters, and why it might even be worth paying for. The best journalists will survive, and eventually thrive. Some will be snapped up by an expanding HuffPo (which is raising millions while its print competitors tank) and by the inevitable competitors that will spring up to imitate its business model, or even by smaller outlets, like Talking Points Memo, which have found that keeping their overhead low allows them to profit from high-quality journalism. And some will succeed as independent operators. [T]he death of the NYT would be a sentimental moment, and a severe blow to American journalism. But a disaster? In the long run, maybe not.
• British Home Office Crime Maps – A bit clunky, but a start…
• Spokesman’s Unit hails ‘fair’ coverage | Israel | Jerusalem Post – The IDF has spent the past six months learning to fight a different kind of media war, developing a capacity to take its message to the 'new media,' a general term for a wide variety of on-line social networking, user-generated news and personalized content sites.

  "In terms of communicating our message, new media is the future," Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu, the IDF's spokesman, told The Jerusalem Post.

  Benayahu has overseen a new orientation in the spokesman's unit toward these on-line outlets, even taking his unit's senior officers to an intensive new media workshop at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya in mid-2008. This has translated into a profusion of new initiatives across the Internet.

  A YouTube channel established by the IDF a day after the fighting began has become the second-most popular channel on the popular global video-sharing site, drawing over 386,000 page views in the first half of Thursday alone.

  Meanwhile, the IDF has been in regular contact with over 50 major Am

• A Neuromarketer on the Frontier of Buyology | NYTimes.com – Ms. Yudofsky … wants to specialize in research that involves public service advertising, the campaigns for nonprofit organizations and causes that ad agencies typically create on a pro bono basis.

  Current ways to evaluate advertising are significantly flawed, Ms. Yudofsky says. “By going directly to the brain, looking at the regions involved in decision-making, it will make a great difference” in developing campaigns that effectively, say, curb smoking or discourage drunk driving.

  With a grant from the Yale Medical School and a psychology professor as adviser, Ms. Yudofsky is beginning to study pro bono ads intended to reduce obesity; she is reviewing brain activity on M.R.I. machines to find ways to improve their message.

• Splitting the Schizophrenias | The Corpus Callosum – Family interest, in case you wondered: "When I was in training, the chairperson (John Greden) of the department never spoke about schizophrenia.  Instead, he always used the phrase, "the schizophrenias."  He believed that there were different disease states that all produced similar clinical presentations.  But because of the rudimentary state of our knowledge, we were unable to make clear, meaningful distictions between these different illnesses."
• The Fall of GM – a visual guide | WallStats.com The Art of Information – Many aspects of this graphic can apply to the rest of the Big Three but I focused on GM since they are in the most dire position.  GM has many woes, the least of which is a shortfall of money, so why do people think that an infusion of cash will do anything but prolong the agony?
  So here it is, a visual guide to why GM won’t be around much longer.  Unless of course they can actually form a game plan to get some of these metaphorical shipping containers off their backs.  Another thing I wanted to stress is that the conversation about the decline of General Motors involves singular finger pointing. “It’s the unions”, “It’s ma
• Can Partisanship Save Citizenship? | The American Prospect – The rebirth of civic participation this year is not a product of experiments in deliberative democracy or a new interest in league bowling. Rather, it is based on party politics, coupled with and accelerated by new opportunities provided by the Internet. Skocpol's claim that "conflict and competition have always been the mother's milk of American democracy" tells part of the story. Just as social-movement theorists might have predicted, the major innovations came from outsiders, like members of MoveOn.org, who wanted to challenge the system. At the time when it led opposition to the Iraq War, MoveOn represented a point of view that had little support among political elites, which meant it wouldn't have been able to use conventional tools of interest-group politics even if it had wanted to. Instead, it turned to the Internet and created a new model of mass mobilization.
• Gaza – Al-Jazeera English, CNN International, and BBC World | FollowTheMedia – The Gaza bombing and Israeli ground assault is Al-Jazeera’s opportunity to prove to the western world that its English language TV news service could be watched by mainstream western viewers with some resemblance of reporting balance from both sides. And by and large it’s doing ok.

  Much of Al Jazeera’s reporting centered on the humanitarian aspect, with no shortage of verbal reports and pictures of women and children in agony, but it also carried Israeli government statements and had many live interviews with Israeli government and military spokespeople. While the questioning was hard it was, for the most part, fair.

• How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed | Jack Shafer – It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry's proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.
  But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski's 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers.