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:

• Before Israel’s Invasion, Hamas Popularity Was Waning Among Its Neighbors — Even in Gaza Itself | Pew Research Center – A Nov. 20-23, 2008 poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center found that 37% of Palestinians would vote for Fatah in legislative elections, compared with just 20% for Hamas. In the Fatah-controlled West Bank, Fatah led Hamas by a 35-18% margin. More interestingly, Fatah also led by a 40-22% margin in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, conduced December 3-5, 2008, also found that Fatah was more popular than Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza.
• Bailing Out One of the 20th Century’s Best Business Models: What’s black and white and red all over? Newspapers looking for a handout, that’s what! | Reason Magazine – [A]s one who is familiar with the numbers, you could probably print at least three Reason magazines (complete with website, blog, the whole nine yards) for the cost of one elite-newspaper opinion section, with its 14 pages a week. Are the elites three times better? You tell me.
• The Start-Ups We Don’t Need | The American, A Magazine of Ideas – [W]hen governments intervene to encourage the creation of new businesses, they stimulate more people to start new companies disproportionately in competitive industries with lower barriers to entry and high rates of failure. That’s because the typical entrepreneur is very bad at picking industries and chooses the ones that are easiest to enter, not the ones that are best for start-ups. Rather than picking industries in which new companies are most successful, most entrepreneurs pick industries in which most start-ups fail. So by providing incentives for people to start businesses in general, we provide incentives for people to start the typical business, which is gone in five years.
• Welcome site evaluators to the first glimpse of GlobalPost | GroundTruth – GlobalPost began a beta test by about 100 site evaluators today. And so we welcomed the first small community on to the site in advance of our live launch on January 12, which is just four days away and counting.
• English courts and libel tourists | The Economist – Groups that investigate government misbehaviour say their efforts are now being hampered by English libel law. “London has become a magnet for spurious cases. This is a terrifying prospect to most NGOs because of legal costs alone,” says Dinah PoKemper, general counsel at the New York-based Human Rights Watch. It recently received a complaint from lawyers acting for a foreign national named in a report on an incident of mass murder. “We were required to spend thousands of pounds in defending ourselves against the prospect of a libel suit, when we had full confidence in the accuracy of our report,” she says.

  The problem is not just money. Under English libel law, a plaintiff must prove only that material is defamatory; the defendant then has to justify it, usually on grounds of truth or fairness. That places a big burden on human-rights groups that compile reports from confidential informants—usually a necessity when dealing with violent and repressive regimes.

• How You Can Help Us Flag Great Journalism (Now Even Easier!) | ProPublica – If you have an account with the bookmarking site Delicious, now all you have to do is tag an article "PPlinks" and we'll see it right away. (If you don't already have an account, Delicious is just a handy way to share links. It's easy to sign up for. And no, we're not getting any Delicious-y kickbacks.)