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:

• Does Rupert Murdoch really “despise” Bill O’Reilly? | Media Matters – "Wolff tries to cement the deal about Murdoch's supposed hatred of O'Reilly [emphasis added]:

  "The embarrassment can no longer be missed. [Murdoch] mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O'Reilly."

  This seems to border on biographer-as-mind-reader territory."

• Police Treatment of Journalist Sparks Outcry in France | washingtonpost.com – "The knocks on his door came at 6:40 a.m., Vittorio de Filippis recalled, when Paris was still dark and he was fast asleep. Three police officers — a pair of men and a woman, all wearing armbands — had come to take him in.

  By the time his ordeal ended five hours later, about 11:30 a.m. Friday, the journalist wrote, he had been manhandled, handcuffed, humiliated in front of his sons, twice forced to strip and submit to body cavity searches and interrogated without lawyers by an investigating magistrate — all over a two-year-old libel case.

  The treatment meted out to Filippis, an executive and former editor in chief of the Paris newspaper Liberation, prompted an outcry Saturday from his colleagues, lawyers and other supporters, who said the tactics were out of place in a country with long and cherished traditions of rule of law and freedom of expression."

• Aging Not Slowed By Antioxidants, Study Rejects 50 Year Old Theory | Medical News Today – In 1956 the biogerontologist Denham Harman proposed that aging was the result of an accumulation of "oxidative stress" such as that inflicted on cells by free radicals. Gems and colleagues now suggest this theory is not correct and that superoxide is not a major cause of aging.

  Gems said the free radical theory of aging, which has dominated the field for over 50 years, "just doesn't stand up to the evidence."

• How I Wolff’d down the Murdoch book | Mediafile – Michael Wolff: "[People say] this is a man who we think is a control freak and a visionary and who has had this very clear plan of dominance, and I find that not to be true at all. This is a company that has been built over more than 50 years with very little vision. It was a series of opportunities. … I found him to be the ultimate city editor. Whatever happened yesterday is gone."
• George Brock: The end of journalism | TLS – "[J]ournalism is in trouble as an idea. Does this matter? The fourth estate cannot, thank goodness, be managed, reformed or even considered as a coherently organized profession. But journalists could think more clearly than they do about how to improve the level of trust in their work. The case for the professionals needs making all over again.

  With humility."

• Chicago News and Opinion on The Huffington Post – The local viewspaper of the future?
• Newspapers, Swedish detectives and the small print | Roger Alton – Roger Alton, blogger: "The Independent has been in the news a bit recently, and thats's why I would like to ask anybody out there for views. What we want to do is produce the sort of newspaper you really want.

  So please let me know the type of news or features or pictures or investigations you would like.  Do you want  Strictly or the Large Hadron Collider or Britain on the Booze, or Damian Green or all of the above? I sometimes think we are not  women-friendly enough in our coverage. But I am a bloke and  probably useless at that, so I am asking you: what could we do to become more woman-friendly?
  And I think our print product and our multi-platform web operations — online, video, downloads etc etc — should be closely related. I can't get enough of our brilliant political analyst Steve Richards  —  and I mean that in a good way —  so I would like to see him all over the internet as well as the paper. But of course he is only human!
   
  Anyway, please let  me know below."

• Capital Allocation is Still King (Newspaper Edition) | Seeking Alpha – "Today, the Times is still considered the paper of record, and dwarfs the Post in terms of daily circulation (1,038,000 to 635,000). Both have suffered greatly from the decline of the newspaper business. Look closer at the financials of their parent companies, however, and a different picture emerges:

  The New York Times Company has a market capitalization of $1.08 billion. The family that controls it, the Ochs-Sulzbergers, owns about 19% of the equity, about $206 million.
  The Washington Post Company has a market capitalization of $3.7 billion. The controlling Graham family's interest amount to at least $1.8 billion.

  How could the Grahams have caught up to and overtaken the Sulzbergers when the latter's flagship product continues to be larger, and both flagships are suffering? The answer, in the main, is superior capital allocation over a period of decades."

• Of course we’ll have newspapers. But will there be any news in them? | Nieman Watchdog – "Democracy, and indeed, Zell’s cherished capitalism, must have a vibrant and free press to survive and prosper. And you are not going to get that kind of press by simply listening to your customer and giving him what he or she wants. That’s what Detroit did when everyone told them they wanted an SUV. And look where that got them, and all of us.

  I suspect that once again our future is at least in part in our past. To thrive and prosper, newspapers have to figure out how to deliver journalism that makes the public believe we once again are a public trust, something of value and something they won’t hesitate to pay for.  Instead many papers today are trying to give readers entertainment, without the drama and without the laughs."

• State of the Blogosphere 2008 – Day 2: The What And Why of Blogging | Technorati – "International bloggers tend to be less conversational and snarky. Asian bloggers tend to be more motivational and confessional, while European bloggers are more confrontational. Women tend to be more conversational in their blogging style, while men tend to be expert. Finally, those under 34 are more confessional in their blogging style, while those over 35 are more expert in their style.

  Fewer than one in five bloggers consider themselves snarky or confessional."

• Cub reporter savaged over climate-change scepticism | New Scientist – Looking into Lovley's stories, I found half a dozen websites had already torn her reporting to shreds including David Roberts of Grist.org who called the stories "the most jaw-droppingly moronic stories I've ever seen," and characterised Lovely as "the most dimwitted, gullible reporter in DC" . Ouch…

  What do you think?  Is Politico at fault for giving so much, one-sided ink to those still in denial over climate change, or, did Roberts go overboard in his condemnation of a young, cub reporter?

• Letter: Ludicrous case against journalist | The Guardian – "It is clearly more newsworthy to be a politician than a journalist, but while Damian Green had over two pages, a leader and several letters devoted to him (November 29), Sally Murrer had to make do with a passing mention in the leader: "Yesterday a case collapsed involving a local journalist".

  Sally Murrer was that journalist. A 50-year-old single mother bringing up three children, one of them autistic, she was disgracefully treated. She was arrested three times. On one occasion she was strip-searched and held for 36 hours in police cells. During interviews she was threatened with life imprisonment, and became so traumatised she made arrangements for her autistic child on the basis that she was going to prison."

• The Fatal Arrow, Shot From a Crossbow, Struck His Chest | Vin Crosbie – "Giron wasn't killed because he was a journalist for the investigative newspaper El Periódico , but simply because he worked for it. His widow, a photographer, also works at the newspaper. They are trying to intimidate all of the newspaper's staff.

  Violence aimed at El Periódico isn't new. In 2001, 50 people armed with clubs, stones, bottles, and burning newspapers and rags tried to force their way into it. In 2003, a dozen gunmen raided the home of El Periódico publisher José Rubén Zamora and threatened him. Bombs have been discovered under reporters' cars.

  I often receive telephone calls from friends here in the United States who tell me that they are 'taking a risk' by changing jobs from North American newspaper to another. But they actually have no clue what taking real risks are for a journalism."

• Three women employees sue KMBC for age and gender discrimination | kansascity.com – “There’s nothing wrong with being young and pretty, but if you consider television news journalism — and I’m not quite sure that I do — you don’t really get good at that until you have sources, you’re a beat reporter, you know who to talk to and you know how the world works. And that’s not something you get just by being cute.”
• U.S. Media Thrive Worldwide, but Not U.S. Image – NYTimes.com – Wait for the punchline: "Joseph S. Nye Jr., the Harvard professor who coined the phrase “soft power” in 1989 to refer to the ways beyond military muscle that America influences the world, said that “what’s interesting about the last eight years is that polls show a decline in American attractiveness.”

  He added: “But then you ask the follow-up questions and you see that American culture remains attractive, that American values remain attractive. Which is the opposite of what the president has said — that they hate us for who we are and what we believe in.”

  Jeffrey Schlesinger, the head of international television at Warner Brothers, had a simpler explanation for the popularity of American entertainment.

  “Batman is Batman, regardless of if Bush is in the White House or not,” he said."