Yesterday I received an e-mail forward, the original sender a respected, recently bought-out Detroit columnist, announcing his new position with an internet startup that shall remain nameless. It’s not “hyperlocal” but it is zip code-targeted, and since I have my own startup with a similar model, of course I checked it out.

Hmm. Reuters, Reuters, Reuters, no local copy yet, more Reuters and oh look, here’s a story with a byline and dateline, followed by an abbreviation of the site name, which in my world signifies locally produced, original content. (By Cubby Reporter, COPENHAGEN (AP) — like that.) It’s a story out of Maryland and it’s locally sourced, tightly written and professionally presented. Which means it’s time to fire up the Google and, oh my, whaddaya know, it’s stolen.

Down to the last comma, it’s stolen. Only the byline is changed, which I’m sure would come as a surprise to the reporter who wore away his shoe leather getting it in his employer’s paper. So I checked out another story on the main page, also branded with a byline and the site’s name, and it’s stolen, too. From the Associated Press. So. E-mails to the thief and the victims, screen caps for all, and my work as Junior Journalism Detective is done, except for a small rant:

I AM SICK TO DEATH OF THIS SHIT. In my research yesterday, I found a few press releases about this startup, all crowing that they intended to pick up the pieces of the shattered newspaper business’ advertising base. “There’s a new paper boy in town,” was the money quote from the local contact, an ex-radio guy. Well, the new paper boy is delivering crap. Today’s front page has a story on swine flu with no fewer than four bylines, all with the site’s local-content signifier. Two are associated with various conspiracy websites and one runs an online “vaccine information center” that — I hope you are not surprised by this — opposes mandatory childhood vaccination. And that’s who’s writing about swine flu. (And yes, I suspect they don’t know they’re writing about swine flu for this particular website, but I only work on behalf of real journalists. They can enforce their own copyright, if they care to.)

I read some comments from a fellow print journalist the other day, speculating that this is really only the beginning of the end, that the next stable business model for legitimate journalism is at least a generation away, maybe two. In the interim, we’ve got a long walk through a dark forest to look forward to.

The proprietor of the thievin’ site replied to my e-mail yesterday, apologizing for this unfortunate incident, claiming it was the result of a dishonest “user:”

We get 100’s of articles submitted every day by users. We try and go through them and validate them but some slip through the cracks.

I used to think the low entry bar to journalism was a good thing. We’re not a profession; we’re barely even a craft. If you can tell a story to someone else, you can be a journalist. Come, join the marketplace of ideas. Now I’m not so sure.

Rant over.

I’m looking out at a chill rain, alas, and it feels very British, for some reason. The last few days, the temperature was in the 80s, with a strong, hot wind blasting out of the southwest, air imported from Texas or somewhere. It was enough to awaken all the flowers, push the last tulip open and make the weeping cherries weep. It’s times like this I look out the window at all this new green and think: I am so glad I don’t have pollen allergies. Imagine suffering through a winter like we just had, and then finally seeing spring arrive, only to greet it with? Suffering.

Not much bloggage today; you guys have already seen the 747-buzzing-New-York pictures, so no need for me to call attention to them here. But speaking of copyright, I have bookmarked the blog of the increasingly tiresome Lawrence Lessig, and it was through him that I found this NPR story on novelist Mark Helprin, who has stepped forward as spokesman for the pro-copyright argument. The story contains an excerpt from a book he’s recently published on the subject. If only we had a less windy spokesman:

At age fourteen, on a cheap three-speed Robin Hood bicycle that my father inexplicably (to me) provided as a replacement for a magnificent English touring cycle, the color of a Weimaraner, that I had left to rust in the rain, I set out on a trip across most of the country. A great deal happened in those months: I was not many miles away from Earnest Hemingway on a sunny July morning in Idaho at the instant of his death; in the lobby of an office building in Arizona, Barry Goldwater informed me that I was not permitted to carry the hunting knife that hung from my belt; and with what now seems like a remarkably small number of other visitors to Zion National Park, I listened to a park ranger’s radio as the Berlin Wall crisis unfolded. In regard to copyright, property, and decency, the pertinent incident occurred in a field in Iowa.

A crowdsourced rewrite of that paragraph could only improve it. At least I hope so.

OK, 10 a.m. cometh and I have lots of work today. Take it away, lovely readers.

Such a bouquet of delights was the NYT magazine yesterday. (I know the magazine publishes online a few days beforehand, but I’m ol’-skool, and wait for the pleasures of Sunday morning and its coffee and waffles.) I was looking forward to Christopher Buckley’s memoir excerpt, after noting Brother Rod and the Pontificatin’ Pedants wringing their damp hands over it earlier in the week. Is this Christopher Buckley’s “Mommie Dearest?” Rod wondered, describing the Buckley scion’s portrait of his mother as a “mean, lying bitch.”

After taking my own measure of the piece, I can say it must be difficult to go through life as a writer who is unable to actually, you know, read. It’s true that Buckley did acknowledge his parents’ many faults, which I guess in Outer Wingnuttia is a capital offense, but I don’t see how anyone could read the portions of “Losing Mum and Pup” that were published this weekend and come away with the idea that the surviving Buckley is getting even somehow. This is an enormously affectionate portrait of two complicated people who had a full complement of virtues and flaws. Normal adults know this is the way of the world, but in a culture that idolizes The Family, I guess it’s better to sweep these difficult truths under the rug and never speak of them again.

I don’t get it. But here’s what I know: Writers, particularly memoirists, are charged with one job over all others — telling the truth. If you can’t tell the truth — and that is perfectly fine, not every truth must be told — don’t even pick up your pen. Keep your mouth shut. You don’t have to wallow in the bad stuff; part of telling the truth is telling the whole truth, painting the lights and the darks, because only a portrait with a full range of tones can come anywhere close to a fair rendering.

Stipulated: The truth will vary from person to person. The truth is not the same as accuracy. The truth is never the whole truth, and rarely nothing but. But for Christopher Buckley to publish a book that does nothing but underline the fantasy others have about what his parents “must” have been like — that would be a lie. The world has enough lying writers. (All of these stipulations are themes in Laura Lippman’s excellent “Life Sentences,” now available at an Amazon kickback link near you.)

You know the first column that really landed Tim Goeglein on my radar? It was something he wrote about his parents after one of their anniversaries, about how their thousand-year marriage had been blessed personally every day by Jesus, who guided their lives down to the last detail, and as such kept them from ever making a serious mistake or speaking a cross word, and how he personally handed over every one of their children in a holy glow of pure white light, and every one of those children was brought up in the way of the cross, and blah blah blah.

I thought: The bullshit is strong in this one. He bears watching.

Goeglein was a guest at the Buckleys’ from time to time, not that he ever dropped their names, but I remember his making some reference to “my friend Pat” in a column that was obviously Mrs. B. It was right after William F.’s death that I went looking to see if he’d written anything about conservatism’s fallen lion, and, well, we know how that turned out.

Lesson: Tell the truth. (My truth: I have perhaps embroidered the details of that Tim column. But not by much! More truth: I met Christopher Buckley once, at a library event. He was charming at an Olympic level. Whatever flaws his parents had, they knew how to raise a son to hold up his end in social situations.)

Elsewhere in the magazine, Virginia Heffernan takes a look at reader comments, a feature-not-bug of legit publications that I suspect we’ll be wrestling with for quite some time:

Anne Applebaum is an American political journalist living in Poland whose columns appear weekly in The Washington Post and on Slate. Her views are pro-free-trade and generally hawkish. A Thatcherite in the 1980s, and a supporter of Obama for president in 2008, Applebaum is stoutly pro-immigration, pro-intellectual and anti-torture. Last year Foreign Policy magazine declared her one of “the world’s most sophisticated thinkers.” In awarding the 2004 prize for general nonfiction to her book “Gulag: A History,” the Pulitzer committee called it a “landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.”

But what does the analog world know? Online, readers see Applebaum and her work quite differently. To read The Washington Post’s comments section is to discover an outraged throng that insists she knows absolutely nothing. Not long ago, a poster named jbburrows pronounced Applebaum a “liberal fool.” Respondus described her as “a lapsed neo-con addict.” Lloyd667 on Slate wrote, “Anne gets just about everything wrong.”

Just about everything.

This is something I’ve wondered about for a while: Why are the comments on my sole-proprietor, no-budget, stitched-together, lame-o blog so wonderful, and those on professionally done, big-budget, well-respected sites so terrible? I’ve referred in the past to the Free Press Klavern, the slavering, anonymous, brain-free troupe of readers who feel obligated to chime in on every Detroit story and turn it racial. Let’s just go over there and see…

OK. Here’s a feel-good story about one of the city’s most prominent businessmen, who’s married to a younger woman (not under nefarious circumstances; he was a widower). She’s expecting twins. Let’s just fish one out of the hat:

Are they really his? I guess we will have to see what they look like.

And so on. Big media companies go to great, painstaking lengths to make themselves “diverse” inside and out, and Gannett probably goes the furthest — they were the company that decreed from on high that reporters must seek out non-white sources on all stories. (Which spawned some of the great inside-baseball media stories, which we can all tell one of these days after it sinks beneath the waves.) I can’t imagine being a black reporter or editor, working hard on a story, and having this stuff attached to it like a hemorrhoid. (It’s not just race that excites the yahoos, but that’s topic No. 1.)

I’ve heard different things about Gannett comment threads, but all via grapevines, nothing official. The gist is that they purposely keep their hands off, for legal reasons — if you moderate, you’re responsible for what appears there, but if you don’t, you’re not, so the explanation goes. It makes no sense to me, but then, I’m not a lawyer.

It’s the anonymity that brings out the beast in people, of course. Take away the name, and people feel free to say any damn thing that bubbles out of their id. I don’t except myself, either — I’ve been an anonymous blog commenter in the past, and while I don’t do it anymore, I will say that it served its purpose. But most people who comment here are anonymous or at least somewhat shrouded — I know Coozledad’s real name, and it is neither Coozle, nor Dad — but we generally keep things decent and respectful.

Maybe it’s the anonymity, plus the size of the net cast. When you’re one of thousands reading a MSM website, it just seems easier to spew. I don’t know. I do know I’m grateful to you folks for being the fabulous community you are, from sea to shining sea and then to a few more seas (hello, Copenhagen!). Don’t ever change, or if you do, just get funnier and smarter.

Russian-study time. Have a great day.

It rained all day yesterday — hard, cold and sideways — and now something hard and needle-like is falling on the skylight. Could it be? Yes it could: Freezing rain/hail! And spring is delayed another day or two.

Don’t mind me. I always liked the feel of a nice snug straitjacket.

A few notes/clarifications/follows:

My comments about Susan Boyle got linked here and there, and reading the comments on other blogs, it seems there are some who believe my contempt was aimed at her, not at those surrounding her. Nothing could be further, etc., although I do wonder why anyone, let alone a nice Scottish virgin (say that phrase in a Scottish accent — it’s fun), would willingly climb between the sheets with Simon Cowell — talk about your deals with the devil. But obviously there aren’t many producers willing to take a chance on a woman like Boyle, and if she wanted to be heard outside her Scottish village, this was probably the only way it was going to happen.

No, my problem is with the people who treat her like some sort of sideshow, and in so doing reveal their not-particularly-hidden contempt for anyone who dares break the mold of what’s considered acceptable in our culture.

One more note: Not long ago I heard something on public radio about John Philip Sousa’s reaction to Mr. Edison’s infernal invention, the phonograph. He saw in an instant what it would lead to — the loss of music as an amateur pursuit, that’s what:

…when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely…

In Sousa’s time, music belonged to anyone who had the minimal discipline to learn it. Everyone — or, at least, far more people — could pick out a tune on the piano, favor the group with a song, play the fiddle at a Saturday-night dance. When entertainment was scarce, everyone entertained. You lent your talent, whatever it might amount to, to your church choir, your community band, your local musical society. When the music business amounted to the sale of sheet music, it was a far more democratic institution. Music was like the local plant life — unique in a particular place, shaped by circumstances and geography.

Boyle is, I think, far more rooted in this older world than ours. While she’s obviously influenced by the musical theater and other modern institutions, she seems to have one foot firmly planted in a time when being able to carry a tune meant you were somewhere on the scale from normal-to-gifted, not a superstar waiting to be discovered.

Of course her new Svengali will help her make a record. Here’s hoping it enables her to spend her remaining years wherever she wants, in Scotland or on a beach somewhere, singing like a canary just for the joy of it.

Also, I saw most, but not all, of HBO’s “Grey Gardens” the other night, and I have to say, I was impressed. I thought combining the Edies’ backstories with their degradation brought a note of empathy to the whole sad and squalid affair, and the acting, particularly Jessica Lange’s, was outstanding. Just the right combination of needy and calculating, mama spider sitting in her web waiting for the right moment to wrap her daughter up in it for good.

Needless to say, the wardrobe was fabulous. Why don’t we wear cloche hats anymore? They looked good on everyone.

Congratulations to the Detroit Free Press for their well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Unrelated: The other day I read about a prostitution ring in the metro area that relied on Craigslist, and the Free Press article said:

Sheriff Warren Evans charged Wednesday that Craigslist is major source of prostitution. He said the evidence will be sent to Chicago to bolster a federal civil case filed March 5 against the giant Internet firm by the Cook County sheriff.

“Giant internet firm.” I ask you. It is the truck that ran over our industry, and we don’t even know what color it is.

For what Wikipedia’s worth, the giant internet firm operates out of a nondescript house in San Francisco and has 28 employees.

And now I am off to mail the letter that will seal my summer in a nice package: I’m teaching a class this spring/summer term. At the university level, which I’m sure will give all you tuition-paying moms and dads pause. In internet journalism, at Wayne State. I’m as stunned as you are, but for now, I have to get my letter of offer back to them before the deadline. So I’m off, eh?

The New York Times now runs ads on its front page and, occasionally, a different sort of report on what journalism is becoming. Yesterday there was a pretty good piece on “hyperlocal” websites, and since that’s what I’m trying to do, of course I read it avidly.

And I see my/our problem: We’re too tied to actual human beings. You know — storytellers.

It seems, if you want to attract the big journalism-foundation grants and venture-capital bucks, you have to figure out a way to do it without people. The ultimate hyperlocal site, I gather, is something like Outside.in, which:

…publishes no original content. The company gathers articles and blog posts and scans them for geographical cues like the name of a restaurant or indicative words like “at” or “near.” An iPhone application lets users read articles about events within a thousand of feet of where they are standing. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, licenses feeds of links to big news sites that want to deepen their local coverage, like that of NBC’s Chicago affiliate.

Venture capital firms have invested $7.5 million in the company, partly on the bet that it can cut deals with newspapers to have their sales forces sell neighborhood-focused ads for print and the Web.

Indeed, when I go to Outside.in it uses its IP-sniffers to point me to “Recent Stories and Discussions in Grosse Pointe Farms.” There’s a single link, to a two-week-old story from Crain’s Detroit Business about an earnings report from a Farms-based company. No discussions (or “Discussions” — I know I’m screwed when the thing that bugs me most about this outfit is that it Doesn’t Know What Should Be Capitalized). Seven-point-five million. I’m astonished. Do you know what my two partners and I could do with $7.5 million?

More promising is EveryBlock, started by some guy who got a big grant from the Knight Foundation. It’s deeper, but again — it relies on the fact someone else is out there doing the shoe-leather work, to which it links. To be sure, it does some interesting stuff with data feeds, public documents and clickable-nine-ways-to-Sunday zip-code-based information, but what is missing? A heartbeat. Fingerprints. The hot, stinky breath of a human being who looked at those crime reports and tried to see a pattern or — what’s the word I’m looking for? — oh, right:

A story.

Most promising of all is Patch, which still believes in human beings. It has editors and reporters, runs the sort of pictures newspapers don’t run anymore (and let me just add: for good reason). It Twitters, it has mojo (mobile journalists), it has bells and whistles galore. Patch is the closest to what we’re doing, with one key difference: It has money. Seven software engineers?! My head is spinning. Also vice presidents, directors of, and the inevitable Jeff Jarvis, who I’m going to bet is not working free of charge.

We have: We three, plus some volunteers, many of them bought-out and otherwise idled Detroit newspaper journalists. We have: No money other than our own, although we’re finalists for a grant in the low five figures. I’m interested in harnessing the power of the bell and the whistle, but I remain, at the center of it all, stubbornly old school. Bells and whistles are only tools. Story is the key. I believe in stories. I’m so old I smell of Dentu-Creme, but I believe in stories.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to update the public-safety map. I’m groping toward a voice for this little corner of the site. Maybe the Arcata Eye’s, crossed with my own. Need to brush up on my limerick-writing skills.

By the way, while I was in one of the Pointe police departments yesterday, gleaning what I could from the reports, the conference-room TV was tuned to Fox News. They ran a breathless promo for the tea-party protest coverage, which I gather has been set for this weekend. Tea partiers are upset over taxation, they say. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most of these people, theoretically under $250K annual income themselves, getting a tax cut under the new regime? I’m confused.

And I see Minnesota now has its second senator. Can it be over now? Doubtful.

Happy Tax Day eve to you. Get filing.

I wandered through the room as Lester Holt was laying out the pirate-rescue details on NBC, and of course I stopped. (I cannot walk past Lester Holt without stopping, I am so fascinated by his utterly immobile upper lip. My old neighbor, the ex-dental hygienist, theorized he’d had extremely good cleft-lip surgery at some point in his life. But never mind that.)

What fascinated me this time was the animation of the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips. They needed an animation — a re-creation, based on information provided by the Navy — because of course reporters weren’t there. I don’t know how close the U.S. news media was able to get to the scene, but the correspondent on the scene was in Kenya, so that’s a pretty good bet. Anyway, the animation was very odd. You know those caricatures you see lately, where the caricature is all done in Photoshop? (Example.) No need to learn to draw when you can emphasize features with digital tools. It was like that — the “ocean” was plainly a water tank, the “ships” were toy models and the Somali pirates were symbolized by three black silhouettes; when they were “shot,” the silhouettes popped into the air and then flew out of frame.

Oh, hell — let’s just go spelunking for the damn clip. Here it is. Sorry about the Applebee’s ad.

I’m not opposed to re-creations or animated graphics. This one was just weird. And sorry, but I’m a word person. Describe it simply and clearly, and I can see it in my head. Lots of people probably think a lifeboat resembles a giant rowboat, however, like the ones in “Titanic.” So I can see the problem.

By the way, is there anything to these reports, about why the pirates feel justified in robbing American and European ships? I know, I know — failed state, warlords, etc. But if Italian mafias were shipping toxic wastes to my coastline to dump, I’d be pissed, too.

How was your Easter? Mine was lovely. We went to the Detroit Institute of Arts, not to see the Norman Rockwell exhibit or anything, but just to poke around. I hadn’t been since the big reno/reorg a couple years ago, so that was interesting — it really is a better museum now, with rooms grouped around ideas rather than strictly by periods. (Two ways of looking at an arch, Gothic and Renaissance, for instance.) Alas, we couldn’t linger with the Diego Rivera murals; there was some sort of presentation going on there, a dramatic storytelling thing that required a loud, screechy voice that echoed around the space and was not exactly conducive to art appreciation. Another time.

I also stayed away from my computer for much of the weekend, although I did finish my taxes and discovered, mirabile dictu, I’m getting a refund. Nothing like having a little money worry go away to make a person feel mellow and happy. Which is why I don’t understand Caroline Kennedy these days — glutton for punishment, or does she really think these things should be hers? The Vatican? Why not Ireland, or Luxembourg, or some nice, inconsequential minor principality with good food and a decent party circuit? Who in their right mind would want to grovel before Ratzi? As Michael Wolff puts it:

Caroline Kennedy has come to represent something that makes people crazy. Whatever she wants, people don’t want her to have. This is partly because she can’t but seem to act like she’s entitled to it. And it is partly because she does not seem to want to bother erecting the pretense that she is qualified for it (after all, she, of all people, knows that most politicians are not brain surgeons). And it is partly because her desperation is so apparent. She needs a job. Any job. Please. Which is not a good way to present yourself.

Well, yeah. Is being rich that boring? Having made one’s choice (to be quiet and wealthy and good), is it so hard to realize it doesn’t come with all the benefits one would like? This girl needs a good therapist.

And that’s it for me, today. Off to speak to a journalism class out in Dearborn and then to contribute to my IRA. And then to e-file.

One of the local bloggers refers to the Free Press’ reader comments as the Klavern, and one look at it after a story touching on race — as approximately 75 percent of all stories in Detroit do, and a little imagination can bring the other 25 percent under the umbrella — shows why that’s true:

I see it all now. A new amusement park right on the riverfront.
“GHETTOVILLE” !!!
A real life amusement park. You’ll take part in muggings, and car jackings. See what it’s like to live in a crackhouse neighborhood. Try your skills as either a streetwalker or a crack dealer. Dress up like a clown and serve on the city council.
for the kids there is the “Who’s your daddy” ride

Ha ha. This was attached to a story on the Cobo expansion, which is, of course, about race.

This is one of the things we’ve discussed about GrossePointeToday.com, whether we’re going to allow anonymous comments, and we’ve decided we’d rather have fewer with real names attached than the sort of sewage allowing anonymity would encourage.

Earlier this week, a former editor at the Washington Post’s website defended the anonymous variety, arguing they served as an unpleasant but necessary reminder of a particular segment of the audience. This was picked up by Romenesko, where all important issues of journalism are debated, and it was there that a Gannett reporter replied with his own experience. Hello, future of journalism:

Like other Gannett papers, the Register has turned its newsroom into an “Information Center,” in part by publishing rumors, half-truths and outright lies submitted by anonymous folks with screen names like “Hugh G. Rekshon.” Not long ago, we had a reader who decided to publish on our site the juvenile court record of a young woman, complete with references to drug testing, psychological exams and the girl’s one-time status as a juvenile ward of the state. We routinely publish comments questioning the virtue of female criminal defendants and the citizenship of anyone who seems to have a Hispanic surname. We call that “community conversation.” Others see it as a public stoning, hosted by a newspaper that grants all of the attackers complete anonymity.

And like other Gannett papers, the Register is cutting back on content produced by trained, professional journalists while encouraging community members to submit photos, columns and blogs. A few of our community bloggers have used this forum to write about the details of their drug use and their sexual activities. Most of our contributors choose their topics more carefully, but again, they’re not professionals. Not everyone who can type is a reporter. Not everyone with a cell-phone camera is a photographer. But in the Information Center, we’re all part of a homogenized team of “content providers” — some of whom, not coincidentally, work for free. A well-researched Register news article is published on the same Web page as a reader’s step-by-step instructions as to how a local woman under a psychiatrist’s care should commit suicide using carbon monoxide.

That’s the Des Moines Register, by the way, one of those papers that existed for years as proof that Iowa was a state that valued education, that far from being a collection of farmers and cornfields, could produce a paper that was the equal of any in the country. Won several Pulitzers. I read it when I was in Iowa covering the floods of 1993. They ran exhaustive coverage, much of it presented in Spanish as well. And now it’s the home of Hugh G. Rekshon.

I don’t know why I’m talking about this today. It is Good Friday. Death and execution is topic one today. Maybe that’s why.

So, friends, how are you today? I’m fabulous. I spent most of yesterday away from my computer, and recommend it highly. It turns out there are people out there with whom you can have these things called “conversations,” which don’t involve a keyboard. You can accompany them to restaurants and eat actual food, actual being the opposite of everyone’s favorite adjective these days, “virtual.” We went to B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque, a place I’d not visited before this year. How had I missed it, this place that McDonald’s-izes the hibachi table? The last I checked, the Mongolians were a nation of proud horsemen who once conquered the world and today eat a lot of yogurt. The fast-casual joint that bears its name invites you to gather a large bowl of raw meat and vegetables, complemented by sauces that range from Fajita Pepper to Thai peanut. You present this mess to a cook who makes snappy banter while he shoves it around on the grill for a few minutes, then take it back to your table, where you’ve been given a bowl of rice. Also, a small tortilla warmer.

“What’s in there?” I asked the waitress.

“Tortillas,” she said. Oh.

Anyway, against all expectations, this mess is still delicious. I cleaned my plate and wiped it with a tortilla. God bless the melting pot.

And God bless Wikipedia, which notes the first American restaurant chain to open in Ulan Bator was? B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque! The entry goes on to note: “…neither the ingredients nor the cooking method has anything in common with Mongolian cuisine.” Good to know.

Somewhere in the world is an American restaurant that serves live eels.

OK. So I’m off to buy white eggs, asparagus and maybe a beef tenderloin. We’re staying in for Easter, making it a feast for three. So no ham for us — we’re going with the good stuff.

Happy weekends to all.

It looks as though the Associated Press is firing the first shots in what we might look back on as the Great Content Wars of the Aughts. They’re after the aggregators and search engines, mainly, not individual bloggers, although the story isn’t that clear. They want permissions and revenue-sharing, and I for one will be watching this one closely. I think this fight is long overdue, and if we’re going to have it, then let’s bloody well have it.

The initial response is about what you’d expect — most are taking the wait-and-see approach, with a few trumpeting the sort of swaggering arrogance the web does so well:

The last time they TRIED, it was a public relations nightmare for them and we in The Blogospheres had thought they had arrived at their senses — guess not. Again — JUST BRING IT ON.

“A public relations nightmare” — that’s a good one. Because if there’s one thing the AP must have, it’s good PR. They wouldn’t want a bunch of ignorant bloggers pissed at them or anything. Because, you know, the people who are stealing their content (always providing a link back in tribute) must be kept happy.

We need to have this fight, if only to establish what eyeballs are worth (my guess: nothing), what links are worth (a fraction of nothing), and finally, what content is worth. It may well be a losing battle, but it’s time to go beyond the usual response (information wants to be free nyah nyah) and actually have a reasoned discussion about free lunches.

The aggregator’s defense is that they reproduce no more than a “fair use” portion and always provide a link back (which is sort of like being paid in invisible money). The problem is, frequently that’s all the eyeballs are interested in. A friend of mine told me a few years ago, “I went from reading the paper to reading the paper online to reading a few blogs that tell me what the interesting stories are, and even then, I just read the summaries.” Broadcast news has known this for a generation at least. Why provide depth, perspective and context when you can get the gist in two or three paragraphs? Particularly when you’re gathering your audience via their political biases, all you need is the fair-use segment. You use it to touch off a getta-loada-this blog post, in and out in a couple hundred words, and on to the next one. Most people don’t want anything more, so why bother?

The AP, however, doesn’t exist to provide blogfodder. It exists to serve its dwindling list of clients, and this is where I start rolling my eyes at the stunning ignorance of most of the online commentariat. The AP is a co-op; it has its own staff reporters, but most of its content is provided by member papers, which then take the AP’s versions of other members’ stories in return. Everybody who’s done time on a news desk knows the drill — after deadline, the slot editor sends three or four of the day’s best stories to the AP, where editors trim and rewrite, then send them back out to member clients. If someone stands up at a Fort Wayne City Council meeting and shoots its august members a moon, they’ll be reading about it in Evansville a day later, not because the AP had someone there, but because they took the local papers’ stories and passed them along to the state wire.

Of course, nowadays, if such a thing happened, they’d be reading about it in Evansville via the web, via links to the Fort Wayne papers. At least, for a knee-slapper story like that. For less amusing material, maybe not. My point is, however: The AP is producing something of value, and we need to figure out what its value is. So if a big ugly lawsuit is the way to find out, time for the big ugly lawsuit.

There’s also a reckoning coming in advertising value. It’s often noted that many newspapers are being read by more people than ever before, and yet still can’t support themselves through advertising. Huh. I wonder why. Let’s take a few sports-section ad stalwarts — tires and tits. (If you’re in the market for new radials or wondering which porn star is stripping at which club, Sports is your go-to section.) Imagine being the ad salesman trying to convince the tire-store owner of the great deal he’s getting, because of all the new eyeballs. Pistons fans in Tokyo can read the Detroit News online, and keep up with the best local coverage of their favorite team! But the tires are being sold in Detroit, not Tokyo. Or San Diego, or Cincinnati. The internet has been a great boon for readers. But the strip club is unlikely to draw patrons from the Sun Belt. Some eyeballs are more valuable than others.

So, a bit of bloggage, never exceeding fair use:

As creepy as this story is, the video is worse.

The game last night was the expected blowout, and Mitch Albom sprained his syntaxes capturing it in his purplest prose. No link — go find that shit y’self.

Another incredible Sweet Juniper post, capturing blight on a Detroit “ghost street.” This, my friends, is multimedia reporting. Don’t expect the papers to figure it out.

Off to the gym to battle gravity.

This made me cry, in every way it’s possible to cry:

It was a noisy place to work. Dozens of typewriters hammered at carbon-copy books that made an eager slap-slap-slap. Phones rang–the way phones used to ring in the movies. Reporters shouted into them. They called out “boy!” and held up a story and copykids ran to snatch it and deliverer it to an editor. Reporters would shout out questions: “Quick! Who was governor before Walker?”

There were no cubicles. We worked at desks lined up next to each other row after row. Ann Landers (actually Eppie Lederer) had an office full of assistants somewhere in the building, but she insisted on sitting in the middle of this chaos, next to the TV-radio critic, Paul Molloy. Once Paul was talking on a telephone headset and pounding at a typewriter and tilted back in his chair and fell to the floor and kept on talking. Eppie regarded him, reached in a file drawer, and handed down her pamphlet, Drinking Problem? Take This Test of Twenty Questions.

When you went on an interview, you took eight sheets of copy paper, folded them once, and ripped them in half using a copy ruler. Then again. Now you had a notebook of 32 pages to slip in your pocket with your ball-point. You had a press card. You knew the motto of the City News Bureau: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. You were a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times.

By Roger Ebert, newspaperman. Sniff.

Every so often I wonder what the fallout will be from all these newspaper journalists being thrown from the train. A few will drown themselves in drink and self-pity, a few more will find their rightful calling in a tollbooth somewhere, a few more will land on their feet in other media outlets, but most will leave the business entirely, and I wonder how that will work out.

(Shout-out to one of my old editors, Carolyn Focht, for the tollbooth reference. She once used it to dismiss a particularly low-performing copy editor — “that guy should be working in a tollbooth” — and I don’t think I’ve yet heard a more succinct dismissal of a certain sort of office dullard. She was always funny. When she was a reporter, a disgruntled reader sued her and the paper for libel, seeking $6 million in damages. A reporter from the other daily asked her for a comment. She said, “I don’t have six million dollars.” The case was dismissed.)

One of the things about newspaper work is, it’s the best job possible for a generalist. If you’re interested in a little bit of everything, if you can hold up your end at a cocktail party discussing everything from ophthalmology to opera, a newsroom is paradise for you. So while you might expect reporters and editors to disproportionately end up in fields that require communication skills and running one’s mouth — i.e., law school — I’m not so sure. Plenty are too old to make that sort of 90 degree turn, for one. I think ex-journalists are going to be widely scattered throughout the economy, doing everything from police work to teaching to cooking. When I talk to my bought-out colleagues, most of them solidly middle-aged but still years from retirement, I’m always interested in what they really want to do. Many want to write novels, but more than a few want to water plants in a greenhouse. Or run a little beer joint with bowls of nuts on the bar. Or advocate for the oppressed and underserved via a non-profit.

What I think is going to be really interesting is how the skills from both jobs mesh, or don’t mesh. I wouldn’t hire a journalist if I were running a Ponzi scheme, for instance. They’re such nosy employees, and they have all the law-enforcement phone numbers on speed-dial. I also wouldn’t seek out an ex-reporter if I wanted a sir-yes-sir type; it kind of runs contrary to the DNA. But you might want an ex-reporter if you needed a bird dog; my luckiest bought-out pal segued gracefully from investigative reporting to just plain investigating, for a state government office, and now has subpoena power, and let me tell you, that is a man to be feared.

If nothing else, we might get some good bloggers out of the Great Delamination. Meet Heather Lalley, former features reporter in Spokane, now bought-out and headed for culinary school in Chicago, specializing in baking. Check out her blog, Flour Girl, about the journey, with a recipe in nearly every entry.

Here’s something else I’m thinking about of late: Populist rage. Everyone I know is walking around in a state of low simmer, hoping someone wearing a T-shirt emblazoned Lehman Brothers Team Building 2003: Bon jour, Monte Carlo! wanders through their field of vision, just to give them something to punch besides the wall and sofa cushions. But the thing about rage is, sometimes it gets a little unfocused. So I was intrigued by this WSJ story today, about the reaction to the spreading ubiquity of red-light cameras:

The village of Schaumburg, Ill., installed a camera at Woodfield Mall last November to film cars that were running red lights, then used the footage to issue citations. Results were astonishing. The town issued $1 million in fines in just three months.

But drivers caught by the unforgiving enforcement — which mainly snared those who didn’t come to a full stop before turning right on red — exploded in anger. Many vowed to stop shopping at the mall unless the camera was turned off. The village stopped monitoring right turns at the intersection in January.

The story goes on to point out this is one more municipal service that’s been privatized. The cameras are frequently run by private companies that take a cut of the haul, as much as $5,000 per month per camera. And so the argument about having nothing to fear from the law if you keep your nose clean tends to fall apart in the face of such obvious money-grubbing. Note this detail, too:

Municipalities are establishing ever-more-clever snares. Last month, in a push to collect overdue taxes, the City Council in New Britain, Conn., approved the purchase of a $17,000 infrared-camera called “Plate Hunter.” Mounted on a police car, the device automatically reads the license plates of every passing car and alerts the officer if the owner has failed to pay traffic tickets or is delinquent on car taxes. Police can then pull the cars over and impound them.

New Britain was inspired by nearby New Haven, where four of the cameras brought in $2.8 million in just three months last year. New Haven has also put license-plate readers on tow trucks. They now roam the streets searching for cars owned by people who haven’t paid their parking tickets or car-property taxes. Last year 91% of the city’s vehicle taxes were collected, up from “the upper 70s” before it acquired the technology, says city tax collector C.J. Cuticello.

This is dangerous stuff. One of the conservative movement’s many shivs to the body politic has been the demonization of government in all cases, undermining we-the-people in favor of them-the-low-bidding-corporation, which, we’re told, always does the job better than some lazy public employee, who probably has a really good health plan, too. Municipalities that privatize their dirty work, particularly for such offenses as rolling through a right turn on red, are breeding a culture of resentment and discontent among their own residents, and that’s a nasty chicken that will be coming home to roost one of these days.

However, until it does, we have spring, full sunshine and a lovely-but-chilly day to look forward to. That’s how it is in Michigan, anyway. So I’m going to make beds, drink one more cup of French Roast, write two stories, rewrite another and go to a meeting. Woo, Friday!

I’m in the process of redesigning my old website, Grosse Pointe Today. Erase and correct: I am a spectator and occasional consultant at the redesign of my old website, etc. It reminds me once again that nothing is more confusing, unrewarding and otherwise maddening than design in general and web design in particular.

This is no knock against designers. Some of my best friends, etc. But designing for the web is sort of like being asked to design a tire that will work on every vehicle now on the road, some of which are pulled by horses. There are standards, yes, but there are many more conflicts. What works on this version of Firefox will not work on that version of Explorer, vice versa and double on Wednesdays. Don’t even get me started on the users, who range from bleeding-edge early adopters who won’t use the site until we roll our own iPhone app to those who believe Google is the portal to the entire web.

Add to this the cacophony of expert opinion weighing in on what is and isn’t correct/respectful/smart, and you can see why I sometimes lie awake nights staring at the ceiling. I’m a content person. I respect design, even love it (see above, best friends, etc.), but I have firm opinions about its place in the world, cultivated after years in the newspaper business, years that coincided with the rise of design. Over the past couple of decades in ink-on-paper, there have been many versions of The Thing That Will Save Us, and for a while it was design.

I should pause here to state my prejudices: Design is a package. The package must be attractive or no one will pick it up and unwrap it. But equal attention must be paid to the contents of the package, and that got pushed aside during this era. I tell people I knew things were different when I noticed what would happen when a big story was breaking on deadline. In olden times, the top editors would come out to the city desk and stand behind the editor as the story was written and polished, reading and making suggestions. Then one day I looked up and they were all standing behind the design editor, watching the page being laid out. Their main interest in the story was how long it would be, if we could break out the background grafs into a sidebar and whether we had a locator map.

As the physical size of newspapers shrank, designers were really in their ascendancy, because every reduction required a redesign. God, top editors loved redesigns. It was good for months and months of their favorite activities — having meetings and offering opinions. It would be rolled out with everything from free doughnuts on the copy desk to a front-page column by the editor in chief, touting how the new design would make the newspaper so much easier to “use.” I don’t use newspapers, I read them, so you can see why I remained cool to these events.

It’s not unusual today to pick up a major metropolitan newspaper and find no more than three stories on Page One, especially if a new Spider-Man movie is opening that weekend, because the flag will have been pushed down three inches by a giant Spider-Man who’s hooked a line to the T in “Times,” promoting the six-inch “review” inside. That page will win a design award. The movie critic will be furloughed.

But that’s yesterday. Today it’s all online. Websites are both read and used, and so things get really complicated. What we’re striving to put together at Grosse Pointe Today v.2 is — will be — a community news and information website, and I’ve already accepted it’s the “information” that people really want, not the city council coverage. Fitting it all into one easy-to-navigate package is proving to be a huge job, and I don’t envy our designer one little bit, although she has her own things she likes about it, i.e., “the pictures don’t have to be high-res.” But putting together a one-stop shop for All Things GP is not easy.

Of course, as the saying goes, nothing worth doing, is. And, truth be told, it’s fun to make it up as you go. For all the civilization out there, the web is still a lawless place, and that’s what makes it interesting.

Anyway, this is one reason I’m so distracted of late, as our launch date draws closer and I plow my way through copy, photos, coding and more e-mails than you can possibly imagine. I look forward to throwing chunks of the AP stylebook out the window, however. I plan to utterly ignore the difference between “convince” and “persuade.” (You watch, though — I’ll be lecturing contributors about less and fewer before the first week is out.)

When we get the site all the way up and running, I will invite your opinions, especially from you journalists. We’re told there must be mad experimentation in our field, and that’s what we’re doing. Emphasis on “mad.” So I’m off to plow through that 39-page bolus of copy once again.