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:

• When Greed Is Good | Fred Wilson – "No 100% mortgages even for Warren Buffet. No low doc mortgages. No financing of closing costs in mortgages. Make all borrowers have skin in the game. No leveraging capital 30-40 times for any financial instititions. No mortgage based derivatives of any kind – why? Cause you cannot collect mortgage payments when the mortgage is "embedded" and "divided" by securitization. Teach the guys with mousse in their hair how to collect a past due payment. No extraordinary compensation for investment guys who are primarily salarymen – let them take a piece of their own deal if they want an equity style upside. No naked short selling. Ban short selling for 24 months. Then reinstate the uptick rule. Bring all hedge funds out of the woods and under the regulatory umbrella. If you want American markets, tax laws, securities laws, etc, then you have to be regulated. Lower the capital gains rate to 0% for 5 yrs because that's how long it will take to work this through."
• Study: respect for papers falls with standards | FT.com – I wish they hadn't used the bogus method of trust polling to draw their conclusions: "The system of newspaper self-regulation is unsustainable a high-profile panel will report on Monday.

  It says an inadequate Press Complaints Commission contributed to a decline in public trust in the press."

• Mission possible? Charging for web content | Reflections of a Newsosaur – Life today would have been easier if newspapers, magazines and other print-to-web media had recognized in the first place that their content was too valuable – and too expensive to create – to simply give it away on the Internet.

  This colossal strategic miscalculation bit publishers extra hard, because easy-to-acquire free content on the web rapidly undercut the demand, and therefore the revenues, for their flagship physical products.

  "Why would consumers buy the cow when the milk is free?” I asked in one of the earliest posts to this blog in December, 2004. “If a newspaper gives away its costly and valuable product for free on the Internet, it may win friends and influence people in cyberspace, but it won't gladden the advertisers who pay the freight back here on Mother Earth.”

• Dear Jay Rosen: You will lead journalism into the Promised Land | Patrol Magazine – You’re mean. You were mean to a Tweeter: “Congrats @stuedal You are the 1,279th person in my writing career to inform me that what I'm observing is ‘nothing new’ or ‘not surprising.’” You’re cruel to people who don’t know what they’re talking about, like Neil Henry, who sniffed, “I can’t help but fear a future, increasingly barren of skilled journalists, in which Google ‘news’ searches turn up not news, but the latest snarky rants from basement bloggers.” You snapped, “He’s right: he can’t help, except in the fear department.”

  I love the way you use hip pop culture references to chasten the upstarts: “Buzzword criticism? I’m just not that into you. If you're a writer you'll figure out what a good term SHOULD mean and use it only for that.” I like that you slice at Mother Jones and Sarah Palin and all the people still stuck replaying the 1990s pre-blog whine about media bias.

• Dan Lyons: Growing Rich by Blogging Is a High-Tech Fairy Tale | Newsweek – I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I'd kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I'd ever had—and through Google's AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.
• Peter Wilby: What, exactly, is the PCC for? | Peter Wilby – Wilby summarises my book: "The public prefer rogues to honest, upstanding citizens. It is hard to believe anyone trusts the Sun or Mail to report news completely accurately or to behave responsibly, but they remain the most successful daily papers of the past 40 years. They are trusted to provide good entertainment, scurrilous gossip and consistent articulation of popular prejudices.

  The Mail could be trusted to support claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism because it never misses a medical scare story. It would have lost trust, exposing itself (to many readers) as a lackey of the medical and political establishments, if it had taken a different line."