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:

• Belgian media tycoon buys major Dutch newspapers | nrc.nl – The flaw in the not-for-profit model: "The Belgian media company Persgroep Publishing is set to acquire a majority stake in the Dutch media group PCM Uitgevers, publishers of NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant and Trouw. PCM is currently owned by non-commercial foundations that were established to safeguard the diversity of the Dutch press."
• Rebates | THE FINTAG NEWSLETTER – Investment banking 101: "You work at Goldmorgan Stanley and you invest 100 million of the bank's money into a fund and the fund gives you 1 million back. You book this rebate as income and take 20 percent as a bonus for doing nothing except placing part of the banks balance sheet (that is the shareholders balance sheet) into a hedge fund. 200k into your back pocket. A bonus for no work at all. A bonus for moving some money around. (I am assuming no funding costs and no other costs.) No wonder investment banks are called investment banks. It is a joke.

  Do this a few times and you can make quite a lot of fake income."

• FT deputy: ‘Papers might start considering charging online’ | Press Gazette – “I think at the moment it would be very difficult for a white sheet to charge for content – although I heard a rumour an American paper might do it,” [Martin Dickson] said.

  “The reason is most consumers of news have got used to having it for free. They would baulk at having to pay.

  “We can charge, as financial news is somewhat different as it helps people do their jobs, and therefore they’re willing to pay for it.

  “As you go forward, the white sheets may be able to start to thinking about charging – the current business model is not looking at all healthy.

  “There may come a point where they have to say to readers ‘What we’re producing is valuable, you have to pay for it’. But right now, it would be a hard sell.”

• Beet.TV is on New Thompson Reuters Video Portal | Beet.TV – Thompson Reuters has announced a new online video video service as part of a $1 billion plan to update the company's products and infrastructure.  I've pasted an image of the Beet channel.  It is very cool how the videos are transcribed automatically and posted adjacent to the video.  This is an important utility for visitors to read quickly and see if they want to watch.  Very cool.
• Interruption Can Make an Experience Better | NYTimes.com – This story isn't going where you're thinking: "In similar experiments, using other video clips and a variety of interruptions, the results were the same: people rated their experiences as more enjoyable with commercials , no matter their content, or other disruptions.. The effect wasn’t limited to watching TV; interrupting a massage also heightened people’s enjoyment, one experiment found.

  The opposite was true for irritating experiences, like listening to vacuum cleaner noise: a break only made it seem worse, they found."

• Newspapers are… | Joshua A. Pollock – "[A]re newspapers really dying? Or are they just failing to adjust, evolve and capitalize on the new opportunities for revenue presented to them? And what is fair market value for an online advertisement?

  Now, I wish there was a definitive end-all, be-all answer to this problem, and I’m sure we’ll find one in time, but I honestly believe the answer will ultimately lie within social media, the ultimate testing environment for network theory.

  Seriously – how many of you have come to this post as a result of my Gchat status, or a posting from my Facebook or LinkedIn pages? And how many of you have come directly to my site, entering the URL in your browser’s address bar? Leave a comment & let me know!"

• Newspapers here soldiering on | The Japan Times Online – "Why are Japanese newspapers suffering sales losses and what are they doing to cope with the changing environment?

  Newspaper industry sources say young people are increasingly disinclined to read the paper. In an unprecedented move, newspaper companies are beginning to integrate and share distributors with their rivals to cut costs.

  The Yomiuri, Asahi and Nikkei on Jan. 31 opened a joint Web site that shows only their news articles.

  The Sankei shocked the newspaper industry by presenting its entire paper in the same layout as the print version for free for iPhone users. A Sankei official said the company receives no ad revenues from the service and has yet to decide whether it will charge subscription fees or solicit advertisers."

• What Comes After a Golden Age? | David Warsh – The excellent David Warsh: "The people we cover, we move in their world, but it is their world.  You can’t keep up. If you try to make this job about the money, you’ll just make yourself miserable. Because we don’t get the money. Never have, never will."

  I remembered that scene one day recently while sitting in a Starbucks, waiting for a source to arrive. A single New York Times was left on the rack next to my chair. I watched as one customer after another picked it up, looked at it for the length of time it took the person at the head of the line to be served, and put it down again.

• In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police | Washington Post – "Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department's officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.

  There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

  Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing…"

• Pelican book covers | things magazine – Off topic: Pelican books visual archive
• Our Excerpting Policy | Alley Insider – Who knew? "As long as you give us credit and links, we are not particularly concerned with the length of the excerpt.  Frankly, we'd rather have your readers read our words than your summary of our words, and we see no reason why you should waste your time re-writing something that we've already tried to say clearly.  (If we've garbled it, by all means…) If you occasionally feel you need to run our whole post to make the point, go ahead and run it.  Just consider adding a "Related" link to another of our stories so some of your readers might come and check us out."
• Top 10 Newspapers in Trouble | RealClearPolitics – One down, nine to go?
• Peston’s run | The Guardian – "[W]ould the run have occurred without Peston's broadcasts? Well, the Bank of England's weekly return for Wednesday 19 Sep 2007 would have noted a large increase in the "other assets" category of its balance sheet – as it did anyway – implying a large emergency loan of some sort had been granted to someone. However, it would have been unknown from the return to whom it was made. An even larger systemic run may therefore have ensued affecting all UK banks, as depositors wouldn't have been able to tell banks apart. This, of course, would not have been a very desirable outcome.

  So was Peston providing a public service by confining the run to a single institution? The 19 Feb publication date would have granted central bankers almost one week's reprieve. This would have been plenty of time for Bank governor Mervyn King and his staff to read up on the causes of historical bank runs and thus urge the Treasury to immediately extend deposit guarantees to 100% of all Northern Rock deposits."

• Democracy can’t exist without newspapers | The Independent – Discuss: "Devolved Scotland is a new and fragile polity in which debate takes place within a narrow consensus. Its electoral system privileges party over electorate and the ruling elite is self-selecting and jealous of its privileges. The country's broadcasters are ill equipped to fill the vacuum left by its failing newspapers. Broadcasters can never do the job of a free press. At their best they provide balanced, informative news. It is to newspapers that citizens must turn for investigation, exposure and crusading zeal."
• Mark Austin and Julie Etchingham on the News at Ten | Telegraph – And how much new money are ITN getting? "Given ITV’s current problems, cynics will wonder if the decision to have more prominent news on Friday evenings is financially motivated. ITV is already paying ITN to make a bulletin on Fridays; now, it will replace an expensive half-hour of peak-time programming."