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:

• Prediction Markets Fail Again | Barry Ritholtz – Go figure: Prediction markets — those thinly traded games played by college kids and other traders  who lack the capital to trade in deeper broader markets (equities, fixed income, commodities, currencies) — are for shit."
• The view from the lab: The comfort of patterns | Telegraph – "Man is the pattern-seeking animal, so much so that he finds order even when it is not there. Books that claim that pets bark just before their owners come home, or that thinking about a friend makes that friend more likely to call, sell millions. The world has more astrologers than astronomers – and devotees of the former are much more likely than average to see shapes, figures and messages when given a piece of paper covered in random dots."
• Who Is Watching Television? | TV Board – "[T]he truth is the industry propagates the counting myth. We let sellers get away with posting to terribly poor data and turn up our noses at sophisticated (albeit not fully baked) data solutions from Google, TNS and Rentrak.

  At the end of the day, counting is usually better than polling. When data from broadband video is available, even when it is broken into five or ten minute streams, those "tuners" are counted. When Live+ numbers are crunched, those "viewers" are estimated, and I would argue that the estimate is more like a SWAG. If the television industry is to thrive, measurement is essential. But poor measurement is worse than no measurement at all. Just ask the radio guys."

• How anomalous is Berlusconi? | Chris Hanretty – Berlusconi can be (and has been) compared to other media enterpreneurs who have entered politics, such as Ross Perot or Thaksin Shinawatra (Campus 2006, pp. 165-166, Caniglia 2000), though Berlusconi has been far more successful than either of these.

  Berlusconi is not even the only Italian politician to own a television company: for a time Vittorio Cecchi Gori (son of the film producer Mario Cecchi Gori) was both a Senator for the Partito Popolare Italiano and owner of Telemontecarlo.

• Those BBC ‘leaks’ | FT.com – "The insinuation is that he is somehow being used by people in the government and the City, where he is known to have good contacts.

  If there were leaks that breached regulatory rules then, by all means, investigate the leakers, especially if anyone leaking is found to have profited from it."

• Yahoo/Newspapers Boost Ad Pact Economy A Challenge Web portal and nearly 800 papers team up in selling ads to local firms | Content Agenda – "Yahoo gets most of its revenue from display ad sales. It's counting on its newspaper consortium to help boost its ad revenue and better compete with such rivals as Google."