“ When I look at the breadth of our business — in one hour of one day we’re thinking about healthcare reform and b-to-b marketing for our pharmacy business, in the next hour we’re launching an exclusive artist relationship with Pink and in the next we’re worrying about fashion and style and thinking about our partnership with Neiman Marcus, [and] at the holidays we talk about toys — the breadth of the business doesn’t set up well to have one agency that’s extraordinary at all facets of what we have to do.

“ I was immersed in the what I call “the last 5%.” It involves a large team of professionals engaged in tweaking, polishing, compressing and dressing articles—hopefully giving them the gleam, smarts and clarity of a top-rate product. This last 5% consumes a sizeable effort and expense. The question the next (or current) owner of BusinessWeek is going to have to grapple with is whether such attention to detail is worth it, or, alternatively, whether there’s another way to achieve the same goal.

“ Buyers are looking for bargains, sellers are looking to get what they think they were worth a year ago,” said Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal. “I think that makes it difficult to get anything done in this climate. I think you’ll probably see nothing in the media space for the rest of this year.

“ Of course, we can do this because, as the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni puts it, much of our mental apparatus is highly tuned to the other people who populate the world we inhabit: in the game show of life on earth, ‘other people’ is our specialist subject. This is also what lies behind the renewed popularity of Jackson’s music. It’s popular because it seems that other people find it popular (as Yahoo’s Duncan Watts has previously demonstrated is the case for most popular music). Finally, it just shows that we are — that’s right — a supremely social species. Very quickly, we find new and admittedly often tasteless ways to use the thing — in this case, Jackson’s demise — to interact with other people; to turn the news, to use the current jargon, into a ‘social object’. Alas, poor Michael. It turns out that even though we didn’t know him at all, he’s provided us with another great set of excuses to do what we humans do best — interact with others. Lord knows what the public funeral will bring.

“ During one flight, a woman who just graduated medical school to become a doctor, had tweeted her excitement about graduating and also flying @virginamerica. Instead of simply responding with a congratulatory Tweet, Porter and her team retweeted and asked someone on the flight to buy her a drink (the benefits of offering inflight wifi). To her surprise, Porter triggered an immediate response, “Row 11 is going to buy her a drink.” And, to her further astonishment, the person who sent that Tweet was live in the audience at the Real-Time stream event.