— Matt Thompson argues coverage of the 2008 campaign was the best in history. The key takeaway, though:

I’m a politics junkie who’s willing to devote untold hours to the task of tailoring my coverage to suit my information needs. For someone like me, the diversity and breadth of information on the Web is perfect. But what about all those folks who don’t have the time or the inclination to cull through 150+ blogs, numerous news sites, forum postings, status updates, etc.? Who’s editing that infostream for them? Who’s pulling these nuggets together, or pointing out where to look? As far as I can tell, no one. The task of distilling this ocean of data continues to fall to the individual.

— Adrian Monck has a worthy retort to this piece in CJR decrying “Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information.” Monck: “Attention…is not scarce. It is a constant. It’s just managed in ways that readers of the Columbia Journalism Review may find disappointing.”

— I bet some newspaper publishers wish there was a governing body like this in the U.S.: The BBC Trust has prevented the BBC from expanding local video content because doing so would bring too much competition to local newspapers that “are already under pressure.”

— College newspapers aren’t immune to the downturn.