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:

• Google Destroyed Feedburner | The Big Picture – "To give you an idea of how irrelevant the ads served by Adsense are, yesterday, the Big Picture RSS feed had 40,305 Ad Impressions, which generated a grand total of how many Clicks? How about 17, or 0.04%.  That's about what you would get from people accidentally clicking ads when navigating their email. It's just god-awful."
• New York Times To Staff: Relax, We’re Not Firing You Yet – "The newspaper industry is cutting costs because it is in a permanent decline. So far, the online business model cannot support anything like the staff that classifieds and other print ads used to allow. This is a business reality, one that the New York Times has stubbornly refused to accept. The sooner it does so, the better."
• Mansueto’s Koten: Breaking News Doesn’t Bring In Ad Dollars, Aggregation Does | PaidContent – "Having regularly updated, fresh content is different than having people who are trying to break stories five or six times a day. I don't really see us as a news-oriented media company at all. With social publishing, you could invest in technology in a way that can help to boost your traffic and on a dollar-for-dollar basis that may be a better investment than investing in originally created content."
• Lauren Rich Fine On Newspaper Circulation | PaidContent – "Interestingly, two national papers, USA Today and Wall Street Journal, were relatively flat. It could be interpreted that the remaining newspaper readers of the world are migrating to national and international news and better quality. Clearly the decline at the New York Times goes in the face of this observation. Further, as major metropolitan papers focus on more local news, it was supposed to stave off declines and provide proprietary content. The New York tabs were off big after having outperformed previously. Declines aren't good and this biannual release is likely to be construed as another nail in the coffin for newspapers. The absolute numbers, individually and collectively, are still large and shouldn't be ignored. That might be the nicest thing that can be said as we are still digesting just how large these declines really are."
• Selling Papers | Forbes.com – "In small markets, newspapers continue to be the dominant ad platform," says Philip Murray. His firm, Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, is currently involved in several deals with private equity firms and individuals looking to buy newspapers. Prospective buyers are betting that better days lie ahead for a business that sells information, a valuable commodity in any market. In fact, Murray says that while many local papers are experiencing single-digit year-over-year advertising declines, some of those serving farming communities or energy boomtowns are actually growing.
• Reassessing newspaper video | Mindy McAdams – "[A] news Web site today is not the buffet table that a printed newspaper used to be. I am not browsing around randomly on your Web site, happening upon your loveliest desserts or videos as I peruse the latest miserable financial news. I am, instead, perusing news feeds and blog feeds in an RSS reader and on iGoogle, clicking URLs in Twitter, scanning the “popular” list at YouTube."
• A Requiem for Reporting as Newspapers Face Mortal Danger | North Star Writers Group – Democracy only works with a vigorous, disrespectful press, demanding and providing transparency in every aspect of life. The press may be disreputable and eccentric, but it is the indispensable partner of the ballot box.
   
  Freedom of the press is the freedom to comment and to criticize. But more important, it is the freedom to investigate. Without investigation, government, corporations and even science goes about its business in the corrupting dark.
   
  Already, reflecting the collapse of the Washington reporter corps, there has been a falloff in the number of Freedom of Information Act requests.