It’s a real dark night of the soul for journalists. Feel their pain. The open season on media professionals shows no sign of stopping. Three o’clock in the morning and what’s up with journalists?

Take these three takes:

First, their business values make little sense, according to Huntley Paton, publisher of the Dallas Business Journal. When daily newspapers obsess over celebs and junk TV, they may as well be shining a light on their competition. And their liberal bias does them little good: by mocking “community standards”, they may as well be waving goodbye to their small-town readers. The solution? Get back to providing local information and original reporting.
- Dallas Business Journal

Second, their skills set is full of holes, according to Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE. He tracks the journalism mash-up, the positive feedback loop of modern journalism: how PR missives form the headlines which go on to form the common sense for reporters. There’s no conspiracy here. It’s just that too many journalists are sloppy and lazy and suffer from a herd mentality. They need a story to be either up or down; they can never just say that “nobody knows.” They swallow numbers in the hope of spraying their works with a crud of credibility.
- Boing Boing

At an in-house pow-wow last month looking at what’s next for the Guardian following its shrink from broadsheet to Berliner, editor Alan Rusbridger, chatting to blogger and Guardian Unlimited columnist Jeff Jarvis, downplayed the newspaper’s gleaming new printing presses.

They may be the last presses we ever own.
- Alan Rusbridger, Buzzmachine

Way to go, says Jarvis. While US newspapers fret about their problems – staff layoffs, increased competition, less revenue, lower stocks, general fear and loathing, European papers are reaching out to zeros and ones.

Like their European counterparts, US newspaper folk should seize the digital day. Newspapers need to become places rather than things. The trick is to create online communities which can then be tapped for oodles of advertising revenue.
- Buzzmachine

From the Economist’s latest survey of patents and technology:

The granting [of] patents “inflames cupidity”, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits…The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just.

- The Economist, 1851 in The Economist, 2005

Another day, another gee-whiz step forward in how I experience the net. I’ve just upgraded the web service which provides the recent bookmarks feed on iMakeContent’s left-hand column. Yeah, RSS is amazing. It promises to pull the pieces of our digital lives together. And it’s nearly there.

FeedDigest is a free and easy way to tie del.icio.us posts, or any other RSS feeds, to your blog.

The way I use it, FeedDigest takes my Del.icio.us feed and drops it automatically into iMakeContent’s html. Allows me to keep the blog ticking over even when I don’t have time to post properly.

A revamp of RSS Digest, the new FeedDigest has a cleaner, sharper user interface. Better control over feeds – how they get ordered, how they look. It also claims to update faster. I hope so – my only gripe with RSS Digest, the way it sometimes slowed up, sometimes failed to update. A thing of the past, says its developer…

What’s most promising is FeedDigest’s ability to filter and mix rss feeds. I’ll be launching a couple of blogs in the next couple of months. Question is whether I should provide each blog with its own del.icio.us feed or just have one and let FeedDigest filter and mix feeds as required.

Impatient for the sixth Harry Potter? Why not try Harry Potter and the Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS)?

With demand outstripping supply, Muggles around the world have resorted to publishing their own stories about the teenage wizard.

In China, there’s Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon; in Russia, Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass; in Belarus, Porri Gatter and the Stone Philosopher; in India, Harry Potter in Calcutta.

Harry’s creator, JK Rowling, isn’t happy about this. Luckily for her, under the WTO’s TRIPS agreement, original authors ‘enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other alterations of their works’. Using domestic legislation, Rowling is waving a wand over Potter clones in WTO countries; they’re disappearing.

But the WTO exists to increase trade, points out Tim Wu. Before the courts intervened, local authors were creating made-to-measure Potter stories. They were meeting needs which Rowling couldn’t supply. The adaptations didn’t dissuade Rowling from writing new Harry Potter stories. By highlighting the popularity of the Potter brand, they encouraged aspiring writers to enter the market. Now, with the adaptations nixed, overall trade in Potter has gone down.

Interviewed by Phillip Dodd for BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves last night, novelist William Gibson talked about the difficulties of writing in an age in which history has its finger pressed down firmly on the fast-forward button – not a cliché in 1984 when it appeared in Neuromancer – with no letting up in sight.

Gibson wanted to set Pattern Recognition, his latest novel, in the present. He thought that he’d become ‘a little bit too slick at doing the present-trends-transmogrified-into-an-imaginary-future thing.’

But how to catch it, fix it down on paper, a fictional present in a real present which won’t stay still for a second, which finds itself in a world where everything solid is melting into the ether of a world wide matrix, a world of rapid information flows where future shock never stops?

Writing the novel immediately after September 11 2001, he set its present in the ‘very, very near future’.

By the time the book was published, its present had passed. Now it’s a novel about the very recent past.

- BBC Nightwaves audio on demand until April 30.