"Oh, I don't read HER. It's not that I don't like her, it's just that she makes me think too much," a journalist friend told me back when I had just graduated from City.

He'd been in news reporting for a decade or more already by then, while I, even though I'd started my media career as a columnist when I was 18, had done precious little of day-to-day news reporting.

And I must admit I found his statement absurd: how can an a writer make you think too much? Isn't it always a good thing if a writer makes you think a lot? Since then I've come to appreciate, albeit very reluctantly, that at least it's perfectly possible to get so busy you don't have time to read writers that make you think a lot - which is a pity, a big loss and detrimental in the long run if you keep running out of time to do so.

These last few weeks I have been too busy with work to do much of this kind of reading - not too busy to read and think, but too busy to really contemplate all the things I'd like to, so here's a few posts that I'd really like, and will return to, to contemplate some more:

• Confused of Calcutta: Musings about a new kind of literacy

• Scripting News: How to reboot RSS

• Cary Spivak in American Journalism Review: Short on Ethics?

• Columbia Journalism Review (via Kevin Anderson on Twitter): The Hamster Wheel

I found this fascinating sign via Jackie Danicki's blog ages ago, but looking through my picture archive this morning it made me pause to think about how much journalism has changed since it moved online and all the debates about print vs online media. If I stared at it a bit longer I would probably come up with a really inspired blog post, but no time for that this morning so instead I'm sharing it here so I won't forget (this blog being one of the best back-ups of my brain that I have;-) ):