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:

• Berkman Publication Series – Media Re:public – Downloads | cyber.law.harvard.edu – Download papers from Berkman's Media Re:public series.
• New Ofcom chair, HFSS and Happy Festivus from OfcomWatch – Channel 4 continues its beg-a-thon.  Really, this has been the most distasteful aspect of UK media policy for several years now.  It’s really embarrassing to see the vague notion of ‘quality’ be used as a rhetorical device to simply secure regulatory benefits.  Maybe the new year will bring an end to it, one way or another.
• Washington News Bureaus Are Shrinking | NYTimes.com – The times may be news-rich, but newspapers are cash-poor, facing their direst financial straits since the Depression. Racing to cut costs as they lose revenue, most have decided that their future lies in local news, not national or international events. That has put a bull’s-eye on expensive Washington bureaus.

  Albert R. Hunt, Washington executive editor at Bloomberg News, said he was taken aback by the mood Saturday night at a dinner of the Washington press corps’ Gridiron Club. “It was like being at a wake,” he said. “Every time you turned around, someone was talking about their bureau being closed or downsized.”

• Recruiter told not to hire WoW players | f13.net forums – Smile: "I met with a recruiter recently (online media industry) and in conversation I happened to mention I'd spent way too much time in the early 2000s playing online games, which I described as "the ones before World of Warcraft" (I went nuts for EQ1, SWG and the start of WoW, but since 2006 I have only put a handful of days into MMOG playing – as opposed to discussing them – I've obsessed over bicycles and cycling instead).

  He replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc."

• Rob Kall: Bail Out Investigative Journalists | HuffPo – It's the compliance costs that are missing: "We need a robust journalism community here, even if the newspaper business is going to hell. Just as, in the past, artists and poets have been supported, perhaps this is what we'll need for writers now. Imagine if the government funded a "news conservation corps" of 10,000 investigative reporters at $50-80,000 salaries, plus health care benefits — costing, say, an average of $75,000 each –probably a high estimate. Throw in another $225 million to pay for 3000 more editors. That would cost less than a billion dollars and provide the nation with probably 50 times more investigative reports than we now have."
• Newspaper economics | Free exchange – Some papers will survive by selling things other than news—reputation, say, or exclusivity. Others will hang on until the print market shrinks enough that profitability is possible for a handful (or fewer) of national papers. Survivors in both groups are also likely to capitalise on the demand for news products that remain scarce—especially investigative reporting.

  And that indicates one area where some public support for journalism might be absolutely necessary. Good, thorough investigative reporting is a non-excludable public good. If a good reporter digs up a major corruption scandal at City Hall, everyone under the purview of the city government benefits, even though far fewer will actually shell out to read the coverage. There's good reason to think, then, that investigative reporting is undersupplied, particularly in small markets.