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:

• How Marketing Succeeded (But Still Fails To Impress) | John Quelch – Unlike accounting or the law, marketing is not a profession. Anyone can call himself or herself a marketer. The absence of entry barriers allows for greater creativity, imagination and new ideas. But the flip side is that manipulation and deception of consumers by irresponsible marketers is all too common. Absent professional exams and codes of conduct, abusers of the marketing toolkit are subject only to the sanctions of the marketplace and the law. The vast majority of marketers are honest and respect their customers but, collectively, they need to work harder to expose and shut down the charlatans.

  At the same time, critics of marketing conflate their objection to harmful products such as tobacco with hostility towards the marketing toolkit harnessed to present them to the public. They also tend to overestimate the level of intentional deception and the vulnerability of consumers. As advertising icon David Ogilvy famously said in an earlier era: "The consumer is not a moron. She is

• Media Companies Need To Become Marketing Companies | HBS – [M]arketers don't get much value out of seeing their messages appear in anodyne ad units (like banners ads). They need rich integration of their brands with content users are seeking or creating on their own. That leaves publishers in a sticky position: either they stand by and watch marketers build compelling online experiences without them, or they put their editorial and creative capabilities to use to help their clients – the big brands – cut through the clutter.

  In our practice, we like to say that "every company is a media company." Need evidence? Go to Walmart.com and look at the banner ads they sell on their site. Ever think Walmart was a media company? It is now.

• British MPs to consider torture allegations of MI5 detainees | intelNews.org – On Tuesday, February 3, the British Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights will hear evidence that interrogators with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) brutally tortured a number of prisoners before handing them over to interrogators working for MI5, Britain’s foremost counterintelligence agency. In exposing the story in 2007, The Guardian suggested that the MI5 agents were aware of the torture, which involved severe beatings, fingernail extractions, and even physical threats with electric drills. Several prisoners, who were tortured at ISI’s secret interrogation facility in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, reported being interrogated afterwards “by people speaking English, with British and American accents”.
• Sheer Idiocy | Mark Potts – The problem with newspapers and Google is that newspapers–unlike Google–do a horrible job of selling Web ads. Trapped in a world of dumb banners and too slow to embrace smarter, higher-value ad types like contextual ads, geo-targeting, etc., newspaper sites simply aren't maximizing the revenue from all traffic sources, including Google. They even do a bad job of taking advantage of Google itself, as I've written before, by not sufficiently search-optimizing their pages to make their sites key destinations for the millions of people who search Google for information every day.
• Another Blog Casualty: Conservative Pajamas Media Ad Network Shutting Down | MediaMemo – The end of Pajamas, which included high-profile bloggers like Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds and Michelle “Hot Air” Malkin, is yet another sign that the online ad business in general is under pressure. But it may also indicate the network idea in general–cobble together a group of small properties that couldn’t sell ads on their own and sell them as one megasite–may be on its way out.
• Ex-Journalists’ New Jobs Fuel Debate on Favoritism | NYTimes.com – Some of those who are heading into government say they do not see their new jobs as particularly partisan.

  As the chief investigator of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Frantz said he was acting much like an investigative reporter, but with two potential tools he could only dream about having previously: subpoena power and, should his application be accepted, security clearance to review classified data.

  Mr. Frantz, who left The Los Angeles Times as it was changing owners in 2007, said he was ready for a career change. But he acknowledged, “If the newspaper industry were more robust, I would hope to still be managing editor of The Los Angeles Times.”

  With a press aide for Mr. Kerry monitoring the interview — the sort of arrangement that annoys reporters — Mr. Frantz said he did not view his new job as promoting any partisan aim.

  “Pursuing the truth is apolitical,” he said.

• Google’s Coming Monopoly and the News | The Century Foundation – Google’s position is so strong that, even when it enables a breakthrough in the rapidly evolving means of distributing information, there is a perceived downside. Take the settlement Google reached last fall with book publishers and authors that established a royalty model for the use of books in copyright, granting Google the right to scan millions of books for access on line. My view is that the principle of payment for the distribution of book content is hugely important and should be extended, posthaste, to cover material from newspapers and magazines… But the danger of the settlement, as brilliantly argued by Robert Darnton, the librarian of Harvard, in the current NY Review of Books, is that Google will now become the repository of all those books online that will, inevitably, lead the company to the arrogance that comes with supremacy.
• What’s the Best Business Model for Newspapers? | Dan Gillmor – The market failure most notable in the newspaper business of the past half-century was felt not by the journalists but by the buyers and sellers of products and services in communities. This was due to newspapers' monopoly status, leading them to extract outrageously high profits from advertisers who essentially had no alternatives. Ask anyone who used the classifieds before eBay and craigslist and other better, cheaper competition came along — they'll tell you what a failed marketplace looks like.

  That era was good for the editorial staffs, which enjoyed long-term, stable employment and, in many cases, some distance from advertiser influence over the contents of the news pages. However excellent the journalists were, however — and many were truly superb — this was not a climate that bred risk-taking and innovation beyond imagining how to be better reporters. Improving the journalism was a great thing; but becoming conservative in other ways was not.