The impact of 24-hour news on policing
Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Peter Fahy said that 24 hours news had significant implications for policing, citing the recent hunt for Raoul Moat in my backyard in Northumberland. “Well over 50 per cent of the time of the officer commanding the incident will probably be spent handling the media,” he said

Why paper.li and automated curation are doomed to fail
Danny Whatmough takes issue with paper.li’s auto-tweets. Elegant product, bloody annoying feature

Twitter is no way to manage a smelly mess
Citing the attention that Armando Iannucci generated with his visit to a stinky Starbucks loo at Warwick Services, the FT’s Lucy Kellaway says that social media is leading execs to focus on external issues, to the detriment of their core business

Pay walls and newspaper economics
Analysis from Enders finds that a “newspaper pay wall subscriber is worth only a quarter to a third of a print buyer” and that brutal changes are coming in newspapers. Publishers may need to consider producing a newspaper with just 200 rather than 500 journalists, it says

What big brands are spending on Google
An internal Google document reported by AdAge shows that BP spent $3.6 million on Google ads in June to help communicate its efforts to stem the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. According to AdAge “it had never spent much before”