Paddy Ashdown, by all accounts, did a good job as administrator of Bosnia-Herzogovina from 2002 to 2005.

So why didn't Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai want him to take on a similar task in Afghanistan?

The Poynter Institute's Bobbi Bowman on news that doesn't break, per se, but is the story behind the story that is often more significant in the long term rather than splashy in the sort term.

She was quoting legendary editor Eugene L. Roberts, who once said: "Many important stories don’t break. They seep, trickle and ooze. Let’s be sure we are covering the ooze."

Bowman gives a census story out of Illinois as a way to cover the ooze of how the workforce is changing and the implications for the future.

From AP via CTV.ca:

Nigel Eccles, a news junkie and former online betting site employee, wanted to try pursuing both interests at once.

Thus was born Hubdub -- a new website Eccles and three colleagues in Edinburgh, Scotland, assembled -- where customers will bet for fun, not money, on the outcomes of real news stories. ...

Eccles, who has worked on business strategy at Johnston Press PLC, a major regional newspaper publisher in the U.K., said he saw how exciting sports betting could be when he worked at Flutter, a European online betting exchange that was sold to Betfair, an Internet wagering site.

The problem was, he didn't enjoy following sports.

"I do, however, follow technology and politics," Eccles said in a phone interview. "Sometimes I'll read an article and think, 'Hey, that's totally wrong.'"

And he often wondered how news stories about pending events turned out in the end.

From the Jan. 25 NYT:

The Wall Street Journal will continue to charge readers for access to much of its Web site, Rupert Murdoch said Thursday.

For months, Mr. Murdoch, who took control of the paper in December, has vacillated publicly over whether to maintain its subscription firewall. But officials at his company, News Corporation, say that this time, a decision has actually been made to keep it — for now, at least.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Murdoch said that the pages on WSJ.com “giving the greatest insights, that will still be a subscription service,” according to Reuters.