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:

• David Leigh: Investigations becoming ‘impossible luxury’ | Press Gazette – From the City University professor: "Leigh drew on the experience of his five-year investigation with Rob Evans at the Guardian into corruption at arms manufacturer BAE Systems.

  For the investigation, for which the pair won the Paul Foot award in 2007, Leigh worked closely with Swedish and Romanian journalists, both from countries involved in the case.

  “Ever since I decided to go down a route of cooperation rather than rivalry, I’ve got much better results," he said.

• Should international broadcasters focus on human rights, or the news? | Kim Andrew Elliott – Should news organizations advocate for causes, even commendable causes such as human rights? International broadcasters serve human rights by reporting how current events affect human rights, and how people and organizations rise up to protect human rights. They can best do this if their reporting is perceived as credible. That can be achieved if their reporting on human rights is neither more nor less than what would be generated by a legitimate, respected news organization with no agenda other than to report the news. There are other organizations, such as Amnesty International, that can do the advocating.
• Creating PowerPoint Based on Research | Comm Comm – SEO implications? "[S]tudents were better able to recall the main assertion of slides when presented with a full-sentence headline written as an assertion compared to a word or phrase headline."
• British media to face banking crisis inquiry | Yahoo! News – New messenger-shooting policy could stave off next financial crisis: "An influential group of British lawmakers said Wednesday that they would hold an inquiry into the role of the media in the banking crisis and whether journalists should be partly gagged in periods of market volatility."
• Social media and the Gaza conflict | Arab Media & Society – While belligerents sought to telegraph their strength, groups supporting both Israel and the Palestinians also used social media to do just the opposite, inviting supporters to advertise their side’s plight on the social networking site Facebook.  Users were asked to “donate their status,” that would automatically display an up-to-the-minute tally of the rockets hitting southern Israel or a running count of the Palestinian dead and wounded.  When logging in to Facebook, friends and acquaintances of a ‘status donor’ would see a gripping reminder of the conflict, such as “9:25pm: 3 additional Hamas rockets hit Israel.  Total today: 33.  Total since the year 2000: 8706,” in place of a mundane update like, “Jim is at the movies.”  The Jerusalem Post reported that 10,000 users signed up to display the “Qassam Count” in the conflict’s first three days.
• Rethinking Disclosure in the Information Age: Can There Be Too Much of a Good Thing? (L. Unger) | SEC – The transforming power of information from 2000: "[A]rmed with all kinds of information not previously readily available to them, will individual investors become more involved in corporate governance? We can only guess at the answers to these questions. While the Internet may be spawning a breed of die-hard "do-it-yourself" investors, the current trend for firms to offer more value-added and advice-related products shows that many will continue to seek these services from securities professionals. It also seems likely that the average investor will use the Internet to become better informed and more sophisticated.

  Most likely, an informed investor will become a more involved investor. I don't know how corporate America feels about this potential for increased investor involvement in corporate governance — cyber-style — but I'm hopeful that it will benefit investors and companies alike."