Recently, when talking with a co-worker about the possible sale of our employer, I said there was no big media companies left who would want the Globe — I had forgotten about Transcontinental, best known as the publisher of the TV Guide.

The National Post has collected the latest media-merger rumours, but it, too, may have overlooked one that hits close to home. That tale has the Liberal-leaning Torstar partnering with Liberal-leaning Onex to buy the Post from Liberal-leaning CanWest (via David Akin).

Also from Akin, an article in MIT’s Technology Review about the need to reshape media literacy education. Although never a wide-eyed naïf nor tinfoil-adorned conspiracy nut, I always consumed media with a dose of skepticism. Reading Manufacturing Consent sharpened my concerns, but earning a journalism degree honed them to a fine point.

Thanks to the Internet, though, it is a lot easier to understand the media, and illustrate trends. A good example of this is the Global Attention Profiles — a real-time map of what country is attracting the most media coverage according various news services (for example, compare how BBC and CNN cover the world).

Visit Daily Flight for something a little different: a PDF digest of the posts for 2003 elegantly designed to embrace the printed medium. Something like this could have been done using CSS and HTML, but then it wouldn’t feel like a printed magazine.

And finally, from Zeldman, another “daily” to see: The Daily Standards (side note: why do so many sites hide the name of their creators?).