I read Kate’s report card when she got home today, teas­ing her by hum­ming the “Jaws” theme before I opened it. It was fine. I declared the after­noon A Salute to Kate Day, and said we could do any­thing she wanted.

First, lunch at the Orig­i­nal Pan­cake House. She had chocolate-chip pan­cakes. (I didn’t.)

Then, a long-promised, good-report-card trip to Build-a-Bear Work­shop, where she chose Mocha Bunny. Then it was off to Nordstrom’s, for a bathing suit that won’t crawl up her butt (half off!). Then we went to Restora­tion Hard­ware, because if we’re going to drive clear to Troy for shop­ping amuse­ment, mommy deserves a lit­tle, too. Then home.

It was a good day.

Ear­lier, when I was wait­ing to meet her at our usual cor­ner, one of our lit­tle neigh­bors passed by. She’s a year ahead of Kate, and was on the verge of tears. Why?

“I’m a lit­tle emo­tional about school being over,” she said, before hur­ry­ing on. Kate said she stopped at the end of the dri­ve­way later and out­lined her anx­i­eties: “I’m not big enough to be a fourth-grader. I’m only 8. That’s not old enough.” Then she hur­ried home to be emotional.

“How do you feel about school being over?” I asked Kate.

“Not like that,” she said.

Yes, it was a good day.

So let’s have a quick tran­si­tion to blog­gage then, shall we?

When I’m not enjoy­ing my local a.m. news­pa­per — which I do very often — I am fling­ing sec­tions to the floor. I can accept that Detroit is sports-mad. I can accept that the NBA cham­pi­onship finals are a big deal. I don’t mind see­ing Pis­tons cov­er­age on Page One. I don’t mind copi­ous Pis­tons cov­er­age else­where in the paper. And then I just…snap.

Take today: What’s on the front page? Pis­tons. It’s a warm, fuzzy fea­ture about the pre-game prayer cir­cle held by the team chap­lain. (Look, more mock­ing of reli­gion by the athe­ist, god­less MSM!) At the bot­tom of the page, a huge teaser to the fea­tures front, which reveals the win­ners of the Pis­tons Fan­tasy Sneaker con­test, one of those reader-participation fea­tures edi­tors are so big on these days. So the Pis­tons are on the fea­tures front, too.

Need­less to say, they’re all over the sports front. One col­umn, two columns, another story, more. Big pic­tures, of course. I turn to the auto sec­tion. At first glance it seems it’s a story on which cars the Pis­tons drive, but no, it’s a col­umn! If the Pis­tons were autos, what would they be?

Ben Wal­lace, I learn, would be a Ford F-150 — Pow­er­ful and durable, Ben’s not afraid to shoul­der the dirty work. He digs into the unglam­orous jobs and car­ries the load for the Pis­tons.

I’m devel­op­ing a facial tic.

It might not be so bad if the week hadn’t begun with this, which included that photo played huge on Page One. This kid has been the key art — the lit­tle pic­ture at the top of the page — every postgame day since, hid­ing her face in grief for the losses and exult­ing for the win. She’s four. I ask you.

OK, enough of that. I don’t know how I missed this Gene Wein­garten col­umn last month, about an online poll to pick the 100 great­est Amer­i­cans, ever, but I’m glad I didn’t miss it this month. He’s inter­view­ing a spokesman for the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, which will cover the runoff:

Me: I see Oprah is on the list, and Ellen DeGeneres, and Martha Stew­art and Dr. Phil McGraw. They are appar­ently tak­ing the place of peo­ple such as Whit­man, Poe, Hop­per, Gersh­win and Melville, who many believe wrote the great­est Amer­i­can novel. So basi­cally — ref­er­enc­ing the McGraw-Melville cal­cu­lus — Amer­i­cans have picked The Ulti­mate Weight Solu­tion over Moby Dick. Do you feel they are show­ing dis­cern­ing lit­er­ary judgment?

Eliz­a­beth: We did notice that there were very few authors.

…Me: The list includes Michael Jack­son, who is a Kabuki-faced deviant and notable skin-crawly weirdo of his­toric pro­por­tions, and Richard Nixon, a frothing-at-the-mouth polit­i­cal para­noiac, and Howard Hughes, who actu­ally hoarded his own pee. Would you say Amer­i­cans are mak­ing an inter­est­ing state­ment about the inevitable nexus of genius and mad­ness, or are they just com­plete imbeciles?

Eliz­a­beth: You know, peo­ple only had three votes.

Me: Really. That means that a lot of peo­ple must have cho­sen, like, Hugh Hefner over Thomas Jef­fer­son or Albert Einstein!

Eliz­a­beth: Well, yes.

Finally, this last link is only going to be of inter­est to jour­nal­ists or those few masochists in the room who lie awake won­der­ing why news­pa­pers suck so bad. A long, long story from a mag­a­zine writer who did a three-year hitch report­ing for the Mil­wau­kee Journal-Sentinel, it has a num­ber of sim­ple insights into why that might be. How about this?

The end result is an often strained news­room where top edi­tors drive the agenda, mid­dle edi­tors worry about their dic­tates and reporters take turns being con­fused and demor­al­ized. Against all odds, good sto­ries � and an occa­sional great one � get writ­ten, but you can�t help but won­der why the paper can�t be bet­ter. The answer begins in the chaotic mess of the newsroom.

… News­pa­pers across Amer­ica face dwin­dling read­er­ship. The daily cir­cu­la­tion of the Jour­nal Sen­tinel has plum­meted from 328,000 in 1995 to 238,000 today. Every year the paper has fewer cus­tomers, less clout.

The edi­tors needed to grab read­ers� atten­tion with­out get­ting some so mad they can­celled their sub­scrip­tions. Kaiser and Stan­ley yearned to win awards with tough report­ing but with­out alien­at­ing the community.

�We�re los­ing touch with our read­ers,� Senior Edi­tor Gary Krentz would say, sug­gest­ing that the cov­er­age of some issue had gone too far in one direction.

A case in point was the �Blue Shirt,� the air­port art­work that was rejected by county gov­ern­ment, rais­ing a host of fas­ci­nat­ing artis­tic and polit­i­cal issues. But the pub­lic appeared to be anti-Blue Shirt and the news­pa­per was wary of look­ing elit­ist, so reporters weren�t allowed to dig too deeply.

I don’t know a reporter who wouldn’t nod like a mar­i­onette through­out this piece. If you are, well, “enjoy” isn’t really the word, is it?

The edi­tors needed to grab read­ers� atten­tion with­out get­ting some so mad they can­celled their sub­scrip­tions. How about some more Pis­tons stories?