Last day before vacation, and it’s already filled with duties and errands. So not much today but a bit of attention that must be paid:

My ex-colleague William Carlton, arts writer for The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, died unexpectedly earlier this week. The story going around is that he called 911 in the middle of the night, and by the time the medics arrived he was unresponsive. Bill had a history of heart problems and lived alone, as befits the odd duck he was.

How odd? Well, let me tell you who Bill’s previous employer was, before joining the N-S when I did, in the large Class of ‘84: The New York Daily News. That paper was already struggling then, and offered buyouts to reduce staff, and Bill took one. Why he was crazy enough to come to the opposite end of the earth from New York City remains a mystery to me, although I asked him several times, and got explanations that all boiled down to a shrug: Why not? He brought a lot to the newsroom — a certain tabloid, rat-a-tat-tat prose style full of puns and wordplay; a gruff personality that could still sparkle, usually when the topic was ribald; and a wide and deep knowledge of the arts that revealed itself in both his work and in his casual newsroom conversation. It was always a pleasure to talk to him and be surprised by his knowledge — he once explained to me why opera singers are the greatest musicians and the truest artists on stage today, and did it so concisely and expertly that I still believe it.

Not that he was a snob. He had an abiding love for boxing, and could explain the ballet of a heavyweight fight with equal authority. I once asked him how George Foreman or Buster Douglas or some unlikely victor had done it, and he pointed to a spot on his chin and said, “See this? There’s a button right here. If you look very closely, it says, ‘The Puncher’s Chance’ on it. Hit the button just right, and goodnight Irene.”

The paper asked Alan and I me for memories of Bill, but mostly they’re, um, unsuitable for a family newspaper. I remember when a local bail bondsman who owned a few massage parlors was on trial for pandering, and Bill, an unapologetic customer of one of them, explained to a rapt metro staff how the front-room procedure worked. (”But forget Friday nights. The high school football teams tie everything up.”) I remember his story about going out drinking with the Daily News staff after work, and the obscene Algonquin Round Table banter: A drunken photographer sat down opposite a crusty old national correspondent, a woman, and said, “Barbara? I want to eat your pussy.” Barbara took a world-weary drag of her cigarette and said, “Jesus. Doesn’t anyone just like to fuck anymore?”

Alan told them about the time a penguin at the zoo unleashed a torrent of digested smelt all over his brand-new Banana Republic khakis and Bill expensed them. That’ll probably make the paper.

When the turmoil at the paper started, the real downsizing, Bill stuck around to see what the new editor was about. He took her measure accurately in about five minutes, and decided to retire. I don’t know if he ever looked back. I got an occasional e-mail from him, and like so many people you spend eight hours a day with one day and zero the next, more or less disappeared.

Wherever he is now, I hope there’s a good title fight on pay-per-view and and opera across the street. Bill appreciated the whole spectrum. I guess that’s the point.

Every so often Lance Mannion mines his old notebooks for blog entries. Well, I don’t have old notebooks, but I do have NN.C. I started this site in part because it would require me to write something every day, to keep a journal of sorts, to keep a notebook in one form or another. So here’s something I turned up in my search for the Dexter column yesterday. Be glad you don’t know me in real life, for I am, apparently, insufferable.

This is from February 7, 2002:

Yesterday one of our neighbor’s kids stopped by. Middle-schooler, collecting information for a school paper on peregrine falcons.

“There’s been a peregrine falcon in our neighborhood,” he said.

“No way,” I told him. “Not around here. You’re almost certainly confusing it with a hawk. Red-tailed, Cooper’s, one of those. They’re big, they look like falcons.”

He insisted it was a peregrine. I insisted it couldn’t be. We had a short argument over whether they roost in trees in populated areas. I suspected I was putting him off, so I told him he ought to check out the Raptor Chapter, a non-profit that does rehabilitation on injured birds of prey. “Do you have the number?” he asked. I invited him in while I fetched the phone book. Alan walked in at this point. “Connor here thinks he’s seen a peregrine falcon in the neighborhood,” I said. “No way,” he said. Etc., etc. “Besides, they’re migratory,” I said. “They’re on the coasts at this time of year.” Connor said they weren’t. “I think you’d better check your research,” I told him.

Alan wondered what I was doing with the phone book. “I’m looking up the Raptor Chapter number for him.”

“The Raptor Chapter? They didn’t have the permits! The duck dicks shut her down,” Alan said.

“Shut her down? Janie? When?” I said.

“While back,” he said. “Of course we ran a couple paragraphs inside, after all that stuff we’ve been writing about her all these years.”

At this point I looked at Connor, who appeared somewhat dazed, no doubt thinking, Why the hell did I ring the doorbell of these lunatics? “I have a field guide, if you’d like to check it,” I said, gently. “Or you could call the Indiana DNR. They have lots of information. Guy name of John Castrale runs the peregrine reintroduction program.”

Finally, the thought occurred to me: “Why did you stop by, Connor?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d seen the falcon,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. And with that, he left. If I could have that five minutes to live over, I’d do it differently.

Bloggage:

I have a friend who works in TV news here, and whenever I bitch about the pathetic journalism — and fourth-rate star power — of local anchors, he rolls his eyes and give me a jaded, what-can-you-do look. However, I think even he would be appalled by news of a Detroit news anchor participating in a crooked deal between a sludge treatment company and the city council, and I hope on behalf of journalists everywhere, this paragraph made his eyes pop out:

Stinger, who joined Fox 2 as an investigative reporter in 1997 and became an anchor in 2004, was paid about $325,000 a year by Fox 2 Detroit in 2005, according to divorce records.

Actually, as TV-news anchors are paid — she anchored the morning news show — this is pocket change. All to look pretty. No wonder every Miss America contestant wants that gig.

Kids these days. Adults these days. Sheesh.

Early exit this morning — it’s back to the gym for mommy.

I’ve spent so much time on this blog complaining about other columnists, I should probably send a little love to the good ones. So indulge me:

Who are your favorite columnists, Nance?

There have been many over the years. I always liked Mike Harden, although he was sometimes uneven. (As are all columnists.) Carl Hiaasen had some gems, but was mostly Florida-centric, and so the bulk of his newspaper work was lost on me. Dave Barry, of course, but only in the early, funny ones. (That’s a joke.) Gene Weingarten. But through it all there was one guy I read religiously. His weekly column moved on the wire on Mondays, and I would actually wait for it, start checking around the time it usually moved, be sad if it wasn’t on time.

Pete Dexter.

Dexter is sort of famous in journalism circles. He wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News when that paper was unique among American newspapers, a tabloid with a real sense of humor about itself, and I guess he wrote your typical big-city newspaper column. Then he fell in with Randall “Tex” Cobb, whom most of you know as the evil biker in “Raising Arizona,” and the two of them got into a pretty serious bar fight. As Wikipedia tells the tale [citation needed]:

(Dexter) began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column, beat the writer severely.

Now that’s what you call reader feedback.

Anyway, Dexter spent a lot of time in the hospital, and then recovering at home, and somewhere along the line he relocated to Sacramento and then to Seattle, and there were novels and screenplays and a National Book Award, and this is about the time I started reading him. I think the first piece was in the mid-’80s, for Playboy, about a guy at the Philadelphia Inquirer who rebelled against being screwed over by management. He did so by erecting a puppet theater on his desk, and every so often a new puppet would appear that bore a strong resemblance to a top editor at the Inquirer. He arranged them in tableaux; my favorite was one where all the puppets knelt before the editor puppet. The Inquirer was, of course, a Knight-Ridder paper, and I was at another K-R property, one where the BS skills were quite as well-honed as they were in Philly, but I recognized it the way I do my own bedroom. It was a perfectly told story of life in a certain sort of newsroom at a certain sort of time, and I fell in love.

Anyway, over the years, Dexter wrote some of my favorite columns ever, but the best of them all was about Mike Tyson after one of the Holyfield losses, a grand tale of tragedy rendered in 650 words or so, and I’ve been waiting years to see it anthologized. Just the other day I learned that Dexter’s had an anthology out for a solid year and a half, and boy do I feel dumb. So I rush down to the library and get a copy, only to flip it open and discover there’s no table of contents, no index, no division by (or even acknowledgment of) publication, no nothing. The first column is 1 and the last one is 82, and if I’m going to find Mike Tyson, I’m going to have to start at the beginning and read right through to the end, and…

…OK. I’m starting to see the reasoning here.

But I have a bad feeling. I have flipped and flipped and flipped through “Paper Trails,” and Tyson’s name hasn’t jumped out at me. Neither has the word “puppet.”

A few years ago, I went into the Sacramento Bee archive (Dexter’s home base at the time) and bought the Tyson column, and ran it here on the blog, a total copyright violation, for which I received the following angry response from the paper’s lawyers: Silence. No one reads this blog.

But I noticed something. I had that column printed out and pinned to a wall in my cubicle at work, and whenever I felt in need of inspiration I’d take it like a vitamin, so after a while I got to know its phrasing pretty well. And when I saw the SacBee version, something was different. He’d described the people who flocked around Tyson after his success as “pimps, whores and gangsters,” a phrase some helpful editor recast as “men.” But remember: It’s the internet that’s killing newspapers.

[Long pause.]

OK, this is going to bug me all day. I just went into my hard-copy archives — the CD-ROM backups I did of this site back before it was a blog — and found the file on the first try. Here was the edited phrase:

By the time he went away, Tyson had replaced D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney with an assembly of men who are there to this day and will be there as long as the smell of money is in the air.

That’s a real copy-editor’s trim, that. You can sit with one all day and explain how “D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney” and “pimps, whores and gangsters” are parallel phrases, that they match rhythmically, that making this change is like playing “shave and a haircut” and then “fifteen dollars and forty-three cents, plus applicable taxes.” They don’t hear it. All they hear is some supervising editor dressing them down because an old lady called and is canceling her subscription after needing her smelling salts. Also, one of the pimps, whores or gangsters might sue.

Rant over.

Anyway, this is what I’ll be reading on the plane.

Bloggage:

Things I just learned: Coozledad has a blog! (Suggestion: Disable the SnapShots preview. Irritating.)

However, I think we have a job for Coozledad’s bull: U.S. exports cigarettes, bras, bull semen to Iran. I had a neighbor in Fort Wayne who bought bull semen, to inseminate his herd of comely Black Angus heifers. It arrived in straws frozen in liquid nitrogen, sometimes transported by a pretty vet student from MSU, and if you’re thinking that’s the setup for a dirty movie, why shame on you.

I’ve lived so long, I remember how Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen met. (She sent a nude photo of herself to his hotel room. How romantic.) So I guess it’s not surprising she would have a boob job on live national television. In Germany. During prime time. I guess they don’t have HBO there yet.

Off to do paying work. Enjoy your lovely summer day, if you have one.

The trip to Cornerstone went well, if you were wondering. As Jeff commented in an earlier post, Cornerstone isn’t really your typical Christian music festival. It’s more…alt-Christian. Multi-colored hair, much body ink, piercings, ear grommets, you know the drill. The mood was much closer to this…

…than, say, Up With People.

(Man, I just realized how little I know about contemporary Christian music.)

But the talk went well, and I had an interesting chat with Jane Hertenstein, who is a member of Jesus People USA, who put on the festival. It’s JPUSA for short, pronounced J’poosa. J’poosans live communally in their very own 10-story apartment building on the north side of Chicago, kind of like those FLDS compounds, but without the wack hairdos, child abuse, plural marriage, raids by the feds and, of course, a scary prophet. If it sounds a little hippie, I guess it is — they admit their roots are in the Jesus-freaky movement of the late ’60s and ’70s. I read a little in their website and, while I can no more imagine living communally than I can living in, say, Kabul, I can see its appeal, and they truly do seem to be doing their best to imitate Christ.

Their festival is certainly tolerant of all types:

Not sure what this guy’s journey was, but he was eye-catching.

I think this van belonged to Brother Ray:

Brother Ray wandered into the speakers’ hospitality trailer. Most people would notice his yard-long gray dreadlocks, but I was intrigued by his feet, which looked so toughened by exposure to the elements they were more like paws. If that is his vehicle, I suspect he propels it Flintstone-style.

It was a nice trip. A lot of travel for less than an hour of work, but what else is summer for but crashing in your friends’ guest room, driving far up into the wilds of east-central Illinois, crossing all the swollen rivers and creeks, hanging with the Christians for a few hours and then doing it all in reverse? I’m sorry I missed most of the speaker who followed me, from Exodus International. I could scarcely believe this crowd was swallowing it, but I also noticed the speaker didn’t wear a wedding band, so it’s possible she was selling the 20-percent-less-offensive alternative of celibacy for gay people, rather than full-out joining the other team. Dunno.

Anyway, that was my weekend. How was yours?

(Note: He didn’t. But he tried.)

Bloggage:

I don’t truck much in the workings of the blogosphere, mainly because it’s a huge waste of time. The oh-no-you-di’n't between the right and the left can go on forever, and frequently does. But I still read it from time to time, and if I recall correctly, wasn’t there a dust-up about so-called liberal photojournalists altering photos to make smoke blacker or some such? I guess the practice is catching on, only in a more chickenshit sort of way. Embedded video has the visual evidence. (Gawker has it in a one-stop, non-video graphic, too.) The NYT has picked up the story, and notes the network’s defense that “altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.” I’m calling bullshit on that — there’s obvious Photoshopping and there’s this kind, which is just nasty. Note that one of the victims is Jewish; couldn’t they fit a few dollar signs on his eyeballs?

Lots to catch up on today, and I’ll be back later. Enjoy Monday. If you can.

A few short items this morning before I start packing for the Christian Burning Man:

We’ve been visiting our lake cottage in Branch County less and less over the years, and perhaps you’d like to know why. OK.

Our next-door neighbor there, who bought the cottage built by Alan’s uncle, tore it down this year. No harm in that — it’s small and had a powder-post beetle infestation at one point. It probably needed doing. Of course we knew they’d put up something much bigger, but we were hopeful it would be, er, in character with the neighborhood. They decided on a prefab Swiss chalet. Other houses on the strip had been brought there in pieces, so there was a precedent. Can they get the truck to the lot without major damage? Oh sure, no problem.

The chalet went in this week. Their truck driver backed his semi across our front lawn and without so much as an oops, flattened two 10-year-old river birches Alan planted when Kate was a baby. Number of profuse apologies that have arrived at this address, or that of my sister-in-law, in the interim: Zero. Simple acknowledgment? None.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

We’ve told Spriggy that if he’d care to entrust us with his share of Leona Helmsley’s $8 billion, we’ll take very good care of it. Jeez, what a bitter old crone — $12 million for her own Maltese wasn’t enough, I suppose. I love dogs as much as you do, maybe more, and let me tell you: $12 million for a single dog deeply misunderstands the nature and needs of all dogs. You can argue with the foundation setup — I suppose there’s always someone who needs to hear the spay/neuter argument again — but at its heart it’s the work of a true misanthrope, in love with the poochies but not a dime for humanity. You know what I think? I think it’s because LA Mary couldn’t get her the strawberry preserves she wanted for her hotels. It queered her on two-legged creatures once and for all.

Inside baseball: Hank Stuever on why Clay Felker mattered:

Appreciate Clay Felker? It’s all anyone ever did, who wanted anything to do with magazines. Was it emulation, or was it envy, or was it a fantasy — working for the perfect place, the perfect editor, at the perfect time?

When I started freelancing, I had a simple goal: To do as much work as possible for editors who could help me improve. Needless to say, I never met Clay Felker.

Metro mayhem: Someone stole the copper plumbing from one of the city’s most visible landmarks. A six-figure repair bill for a few bucks in scrap metal.

John Scalzi printed one of his famous sunset pictures and included his cat, so I LOL’d it. No one will get it:

Bonus: Stay at Scalzi’s for a little perspective on the military service/electability track record.

That should keep you. I’ll be in and out until I leave for the airport, so, y’know, whatever. Oh, and thanks for all the SF recommendations, folks. I neglected to mention, this trip is basically a rerun of our honeymoon lo those many years ago. (Alan: “You sure you don’t want a diamond ring?” Me: “I want a two-week honeymoon more.”) You brought back memories and gave me some new ideas. You guys are the best.

It’s raining outside my window, not too hard, but a definite get-wet-if-you-stepped-outside sort of rain, going pitter-pat on everything, and it sounds wonderful.

It’s 8:54 p.m. The sun is trying to break through in the west, real golden-hour light, even though the rain isn’t abating at all. It’s almost, but not quite, Hollywood rain, the kind created by an industrial sprinkler on a bright Los Angeles day. I can hear a cardinal singing somewhere. If I weren’t sitting here, I’d go outside to look for a rainbow, but I’m enjoying the sound and the light filling the room too much to move.

The rain is harder now. Not a breath of a breeze; it’s falling straight down. Very very nice.

I know I’ve been bitching a lot lately, but today I am happy to be a work-at-home freelancer (even thought I have to go to work in, um, two minutes). But I’m working in a chaise in my own bedroom, on my laptop, enjoying the rain and the light and the cardinal. I just left Alan sitting over the remains of dinner — grilled salmon with cucumber-dill sauce, mixed green salad with herbs from the garden, Swiss potatoes — and he informed me he intended to listen to the rain for a while, too.

(Later.)

I don’t know why, but just sitting there enjoying the moment reminded me of something I heard on NPR — you know, that elitist radio network — a few days ago. Margot Adler’s story is headlined “Perfecting the Art of Frugal Living in NYC,” but it really should be called Perfecting the Art of Living, period. It was about a study of New York’s most endangered species — its starving artists, the people who in large part give the city its character and flavor, but who are also the ones least able to live in its staggeringly expensive apartments.

Wary of using too much in fair use, I urge you to click over and read the story of Hank Virgona, visual artist, who typically makes less than $30,000 per year, but still has the world’s riches outside his front door:

Virgona says when people come to see his art he never asks them if they’d like to buy anything.

“I talk about art. I talk about my love for art,” he says. “I talk about how a walk down a quiet street — especially toward dusk — is as good as going to Caracas or Venezuela or anywhere. It is nourishing. That is part of art’s purpose.”

Joan Jeffri, who directed the study for the Research Center for Arts and Culture, says for these creative people being an artist transcends every other identity — race, education, gender.

“They don’t ever think of giving up being artists,” Jeffri says. “If they have arthritis, they change their art form. They don’t retire.”

Jeffri believes these artists have wisdom to impart about living and aging. In a sense, she says, they are role models.

And what are the first programs to be cut when schools have budget troubles? Anyone? Yes, the arts. This has been your moment of Zen.

Jeez, it’s a hot one today. Of course, the hottest part of any day is late afternoon, which is when the (outdoor) kickoff party for the film festival starts. On a rooftop. Oh, well — if this day goes like the last 60 or so, it’ll be raining by then.

Some bloggage:

Of interest to media types only, a WSJ piece on the widening rift — there’s a piece of journalese, ain’a? when was the last time you used “widening rift” in casual conversation — between member papers and the Associated Press.

In the right blogosphere, Roy finds growing anxiety over “what the inaugural ball will be like” if Obama wins. I’m hoping for a five- hour set by Parliament Funkadelic, with lots of “get up offa that thang!” from the stage.

Color me astounded: Madonna’s teeing up a divorce filing. She’s said to be getting the best legal talent to preserve her giant pile of money, wherein live the souls of the men whose essence she extracted, creative succubus that she is. I think her husband’s best strategy is to go limp: Walk into the first negotiation and say, “I don’t want a dime. I won’t take a nickel. I’m off to live in a garret while I try to regain the semblance of originality and creativity I once had before you entered my life. I’m getting some futons from Ikea for the kids to sleep on when they visit. You are a curse and I am fortunate to have escaped with my life. Have a nice one of your own, what’s left of it.” And then walk out. She’d be running after him stuffing a check for $100 million in his pocket.

Not that anyone asked me.

OK, you all — work to do. Play nice.

Maybe you haven’t heard: The Detroit Newspaper Partnership is looking to cut another 7 percent in costs. Another round of buyouts is coming, but now that most newsrooms have burned the deadwood, cut the fat, stripped the muscle and amputated its pinky fingers and other superfluous body parts, it’s now time to, what? Suck the marrow?

I dunno. I tell you this only to stress that for me, for pretty much everyone with a stake in the newspaper industry, worry is our constant companion. At this point in my life I’ve learned not to let it consume me, but honestly, it’s been so long since I’ve thought next year might, possibly, lord willin’, inshallah be better than this, I can’t even remember.

So I’m always looking around for interesting job opportunities. They frequently present themselves at this time of year, summer’s beginning, when I can’t take them. This was yesterday’s:

Here’s the deal. We sell adult stuff. Not porn, but toys, lubes and all that. In our business they are called “adult novelties” Why do we sell adult stuff? Because people really enjoy buying it, that’s why. It’s called making money. The local economy isn’t doing that well, but we are doing great!

We do the website / Internet thing. We have been at it for 10 years now. It’s not too shabby. The work environment is as casual as anyplace on earth and people here are nice.

You’ll write stuff and maybe take pictures of it. We then create a webpage. People see what we have to say and decide whether to buy or not. A great copy writer will balance salesmanship with truth. You’ll be honest and upstanding. People will respect you for it and you will earn their trust.

The job is Monday-Friday 9AM - 5PM. …This is not a freelance job, nor is it a work-from-home type of thing. This is a real copy writing position. You will sit at a desk in a crappy office.

It goes on from there. They extend an offer to apply and invite writing samples about a package of bachelorette party stickers. I blinked when I saw what they wanted: “100-200 words.” Say wha? That’s a big ol’ copy block for a catalog. It sounds like they’re producing the J. Peterman catalog of adult novelties.

This could be my dream job:

The night started the way they always start — sexy dresses straight from the dry-cleaning bag, new shoes, the thrilling sight of the stretch limo pulling up to the apartment door. It’s Clarissa’s bachelorette party, and we are going to plow a wide swath through the night, starting with pomegranate martinis at dinner and ending with shooters at 2 a.m. Comes the witching hour, and here we are – Jenna is puking in the ladies’, Jess is dancing with some guy who has his hand on her ass, Cassie is slumped at the other end of the table, drunk-dialing her exes and crying for no reason. And the bride-to-be? She left an hour ago, and if you squint, you can see her through the window of the tattoo parlor across the street, stretched out on her stomach, some illustrated-man ink artist putting the groom’s name at the top of her butt crack. And you? You’re looking down at the pink bubble sticker you slapped on when the evening was young, a sticker just above your left boob that reads “flirt.” Just so you remember which one you are.

That’s 187 words. They actually sound like fun people, if you don’t mind the soul-destroying work of crafting 150 words about personal lubricant.

Wait, what?

That Craigslist ad makes me despair, actually. After our weekend of filmmaking, which would have been impossible without Craigslist, I wonder what the newspaper industry has in the pipeline to compete. Many in the business have criticized Craig Newmark for failing to “monetize” his creation; in fact, I think they have a special word for him, from a high-level econ seminar, something like “bad actor” — used to describe a capitalist who doesn’t want to make money. That implies a similar site could be monetized, while remaining free, so what are they bringing to the table? There’s always a better idea, a way to innovate. My guess is: Not bloody much. They’re GM in 1972, looking at the first Hondas rolling off the boat from Japan, scoffing, who’d want to drive that stupid thing?

As I said: I worry.

OK, on to bloggage, because that’s what we love:

Headlines that shouldn’t be written, much less clicked on: Oprah Winfrey completes her 21-day vegan cleanse.

Oh, and this just in: Copy editing outsourced to India.

And why don’t we leave it at that? Have a swell day, all.

A friend writes to remind us of Lee Abrams’ real crime:

True, this guy is one of those hilarious clueless douche bags that big thinkers at failing companies like Tribco believe will breathe new life into their franchises and, as his memo amply demonstrates, what he knows about newspapers would fit neatly under your thumb nail.

But his greatest crime is the creation of the so-called “superstar format” that transformed the wild, wonderful and creative world of FM radio into the banality of the AOR format in the 1970s. His ruthless insistence on tight playlists relegated thousands of acts to oblivion, particularly black music but also punk, metal and other kinds of rock while embracing elevator rock by the likes of Foreigner and Supertramp.

Someone in comments a while back — I think it was Jolene — made an observation about charges of “elitism” against Barry O. To paraphrase: Why do we encourage our children to excel in school, work hard, achieve, get good grades, get into the best colleges, think independently, read widely, etc., if at the end of all this they’ll stand before us and we’ll call them elitists?

Good question.

I thought of it again when I read, via Romenesko, a heart-clutching memo from Lee Abrams, a former radio guy who’s now something like “chief innovation officer” for the painfully evolving Tribune Co. He’s supposed to be the fresh-eyed outsider charged with re-imagining newspapers in the new era. A few of his thoughts:

ASSUMPTIONS: Possibly the biggest problem. Assuming. I met a reporter who spent 4 years in Baghdad. Dodging bullets…staying in Hotels protected by the Marines. Yet, I’ll bet NO-one outside of the building knew this person was risking their life in Iraq to get YOU the news. If it were CNN, you’d see rockets and RPG’s in the background as the reporter ducks shrapnel. In the paper, it’s usually a small byline.

Hell, papers should have photos of the reporter with Iraqi kids…be writing diaries. Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news…Because the paper “assumed” I knew.

THE NPR FEEL? Newspapers strike me as being a little TOO NPR. I like NPR, and their shows like Morning Edition do well. But NPR can also be a bit elitist. Morning News Radio has a lot of similarities to papers: Similar target audience; Old Media; Time restraints. It’s probably a good thing to study the feel of a well honed All News Radio station. Yeah, a different medium, but I sometimes get a slower more intellectual NPR feel from papers than a usually quicker paced and more mainstream News Radio delivery. It’s all about being INTELLIGENT…not intellectual. We are in the mainstream business. The 2008 Mainstream business. SMART…but not elite….and we DO get a little NPR at times. (And I DO like NPR…)

I can’t go back to newspapers. I just can’t.

At least he didn’t suggest we all write STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS with random caps; Like This; …like our READERS DO. They’ll understand, because more of them are like Lee ABRAMS, a man who made a fortune in radio but DIDN’T KNOW that reporters actually GO PLACES LIKE IRAQ to cover Iraq. The paper just Assumed he knew that when a Story has a Dateline that says BAGHDAD, that means IT WAS WRITTEN THERE.

OK, I’ll stop.

But this is, simply, bullshit. I love the part about crafting the paper more in the model of all-news radio than NPR. Of course, I am an elitist — THERE, Lee Abrams, I SAID IT — but I’ve been listening to NPR so long now that I simply cannot abide any other sort of news radio. It’s imperfect, granted, but on most days it’s an oasis, and if it were to disappear tomorrow I’d just throw all my radios away. YES, Lee, I WOULD. Of course, I happen to hate all-news radio with a passion. Hate. The weather on the sevens, traffic on the nines, sports brought to you by your friends at GutterHoods.com, the constant yapping commercials, all of it. Some of us are trying to understand the world’s events, not cram a few phrases between ellipses and call it news.

Someone told me the other day that the anchor of one of Detroit’s morning drive all-news/talk stations makes $1 million a year. I think it was Paul W. Smith. He writes a column for the News. Here’s a selection from one of his most recent:

I can only imagine (but I never hope to find out) the roller coaster of emotions that affected Metro Detroiters have been experiencing since storms knocked out the electricity last week. Some people were without power for up to a week, and I don’t blame them for being angry and wondering why it took so long to fix it. Too many cuts? Where do power officials put the extra thousand workers or so when everything is O.K. — when we take for granted that the lights will come on when we throw the switch? We sure shouldn’t be angry at those men and women who have been climbing those poles, clearing those limbs and holding on for dear life as the next storm rumbled through.

He goes on to note that melons are a luxury item in Japan, condenses a press release about a zoo fundraiser and concludes with this bit of Abrams-approved self-promotion, not a photo with Iraqi kids but good enough:

Thank you, Marketing & Sales Executives of Detroit for presenting me with your 2008 Executive Leadership Award this coming Wednesday.

There’s a newspaper column written — or phoned in — in the precise style of all-news radio: A rhetorical question, an opinion no one would find objectionable, an oddity from a funny foreign land and finishing with an air-kiss to the buttocks. INTELLIGENT, not intellectual, as Abrams might say.

I’m assuming Abrams is not being paid in hugs and kisses. And yet he is unembarrassed to write, Before I joined Tribune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news. Why is it OK to call a smart person with smart-person attitudes and taste an elitist, but not to call Abrams, well, ignorant?

Just wonderin’.

EDIT: You toss off something in 15 minutes between chores, and the next minute you’re on Romenesko. Our comments policy: First-timers go to moderation before appearing. I will try to keep up, but I have to go out in a bit and there may be a delay.

Preach it, Jon Carroll:

One day last month, representative of the California Highway Patrol visited classrooms to deliver some bad news: Some classmates of theirs had been killed in traffic accidents. Alcohol apparently was involved. The students, as might be expected, were stunned. Many wept. Some screamed. School stopped as people comforted each other.

Then, a few hours later, the administrators announced that it was all a joke. Well, not a joke - it was an educational experience. The administrators had set up the stunt to make the students understand how very sad death is, and how drinking booze and driving is a bad thing. It was something the students will never forget, the administrators said, and oh how true that is.

The takeaway is: Don’t trust anyone. Grown-ups will lie to you and try to make you feel bad. The world sucks even worse than you thought it did. Guidance counselor Lori Tauber defended the exercise: “They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized. That’s how they get the message.”

Note that’s a rather lengthy pullquote from Carroll’s column. Long enough for the Associated Press to price it at, oh, $50, which last year constituted about 15 percent of this blog’s revenue. The AP’s proposal to start billing blogs for as little as five words of fair-use quoting has the blogworld in a tizzy, but I’m holding my fire, for now. Far too much hot air has risen heavenward since the beginning of the blog/MSM relationship, and there’s no need to add to it. Here’s a typical comment left on the original story linked above:

Wow. It’s amazing how a major news organization like the AP can be so woefully ignorant on this topic. Charging blogs for the privilege of fair use? Amazing! The AP should be thanking bloggers for linking their way, not trying to tax them for snipping a couple sentences.

I’m not unsympathetic to this argument — I’ve used it myself, when it suited my purposes — but it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the AP works. As we were taught in j-school: The AP is a co-op. Member newspapers pay a fee to use its content, and agree to contribute in turn. (Some have subscription-only memberships; Wikipedia’s entry is about how I remember it being explained to me as a student.) Content is generated by those contributions, and by a relatively small staff of AP-employed correspondents. The daily call from the AP is a ritual on most metro and state desks, and sending them copy is part of the desk editor’s job. Once upon a time, this worked pretty well — there was lots of money to pay the fees, and lots of copy to keep the wires full, full enough that most papers employ a full-time wire editor just to stand by the sluice all day, directing stories to different departments and keeping an eye on breaking news elsewhere.

The AP doesn’t sell advertising. They collect fees and manage their content. It has no financial interest in eyeballs on their copy, except as it affects their member newspapers and broadcast outlets. The copy — er, “content” in the 21st century — is the coin of the AP realm. Make it too freely available, and it’s devalued.

(There’s another problem presenting itself, and that is the shrinking of its contributing membership. At my old Indiana newspaper, we once had a full-time correspondent in Indianapolis. He covered the state legislature, but obviously he couldn’t be everywhere. The AP filled in the gaps when he was elsewhere, and in turn we contributed his stuff to the wire. When we lost that position, the AP became our de facto Indy correspondent. But even the AP can’t be everywhere, and needs member contributions to be effective. So the AP shrinks, too. Less government coverage all around. You see why this stuff is important to keeping an eye on democracy? And please don’t give me that crap about citizen journalists picking up the slack. They. Are. Not.)

Already, several major papers post virtually everything that comes over the wire on their websites, under their brand and surrounded by their ads. Bloggers pick it up and repost it on their sites, perhaps with a few comments, perhaps not. The AP gets bupkis for this. Which brings us to another comment from that original BetaNews story:

Freedom of the press isn’t apparently. It should be completely free to take and quote from AP as long as it cites its references. Originally I thought it was just an issue of plagiarism but now I see the AP is just a bunch of greedy AH’s.

Astonishingly ignorant, that. “It should be completely free” because…why? Journalism fairies will pay the AP staff’s salaries? And “greedy”? Friend, let me introduce you to a witticism offered frequently by grimly smiling AP staffers, usually when ordering the least-expensive item on the menu: “You can’t spell ‘cheap’ without ‘AP’.” I’ve known a few AP lifers, and believe me, none of them were getting rich, and many were barely middle-class. All had working spouses.

There’s the issue of “fair use.” This it the legal doctrine that says I can quote a limited section from a piece of copyrighted material, in the interest of commenting on it. Fair use is what it is, but I doubt it covers the internet ritual sometimes called “fisking,” in which a blogger quotes a few paragraphs from an outside source, mocks, quotes a few more, mocks, and so on until the entire story is reproduced and the blogger feels very, very proud of himself.

This line in the sand may be a trial balloon. (Block that metaphor!) Or it may be a chicken coming home to roost. It’s certainly not popular. But the day is coming, people: News doesn’t assemble itself into nice 600-word chunks. People need to eat. The AP’s content is worth something, because it cost something to produce. Sooner or later, we have to figure this out. Or the entire blogosphere will be reduced to the equivalent of ham radio: Hi, this is Roberto in Mexico. Who and where are you?

So, then.

Read that Jon Carroll column. Give the San Francisco Chronicle the eyeballs. Me, I’m off to brainstorm six-minute gangster movie ideas.