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:

• Medical and Nursing Students’ Television Viewing Habits: Potential Implications for Bioethics | The American Journal of Bioethics – More than 80% of medical and nursing students watch television medical dramas. Students with more clinical experience tended to have impressions that were more negative than those of students without clinical experience. Furthermore, viewing of television medical dramas is a social event and many students discuss the bioethical issues they observe with friends and family. Television medical dramas may stimulate students to think about and discuss bioethical issues.
• AP study finds $1.6B went to bailed-out bank execs | Yahoo! News – Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.
  The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.
  Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.
• "Holy Fucking Shit I Was Just In A Plane Crash!" | Alley Insider – A Continental airlines 737 slid off the runway in Denver last night.  The engine on the right side burst into flames. Passengers escaped out the left side on slides. 38 people were hurt. Fortunately no one was killed.

  In another first for Twitter, passenger Mike Wilson tweeted his miraculous escape. Read from the bottom up. And then buy this man (and everyone else on the plane) a vodka tonic!

• Who needs the AP? | Frank Barnako – [M]any publishers are figuring out they don’t need the AP.  With national and international news having become a commodity, why does any newspaper outside of the Top 5 markets felt it needs to have a vanilla version of a Presidential announcement, a Congressional vote, or even an airplane cash. The news is readily available online and via radio and TV.
• The Conservation Law of Transparency (you can’t be open in all things all the time) | The Long Tail – Transparency is hard work. Constantly updating the world on your status can become a job all by itself.

  For example, our experiments with transparency at Wired have mostly been one-offs. The behind-the-scenes politics of a Microsoft story. The creation and editing process of a Charlie Kaufman profile. Collective editing of Wired.com story.

  Why don't we do this with every story? Because it's a huge amount of work, easily doubling the time required for any project. We can only do a few a year, and that's why it's been relegated to proof of concept rather than standard practice. Nobody's figured out how to introduce true transparency into company practice without making it somebody's full-time job.

  That's why we see so little true transparency in practice (Fred Wilson's superhuman efforts aside) and even those like me who are drawn to it have to relegate it to just a single aspect of their life.

• China Blocks Access to The Times’s Web Site – NYTimes.com – Chinese authorities have begun blocking access from mainland China to the Web site of The New York Times even while lifting some of the restrictions they had recently imposed on the Web sites of other media outlets.

  When computer users in cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou tried to connect on Friday morning to nytimes.com, they received a message that the site was not available; some users were cut off on Thursday as early as 8 p.m. The blocking was still in effect on Saturday morning.

• Quality journalism? | SacredFacts – "Is Auntie really now planning to parachute Richard Sambrook into the position of Director of the World Service without doing a proper external trawl for candidates or advertising outside the BBC?"

  1. I'm not a candidate for the job, because
  2. it reports to me and I will be deciding who gets it.