“The thing I really want to impress on my students is that the commercial case for news only matters if the profits are used to subsidize reporting the public can see, and that civic virtue may be heart-warming, but it won’t keep the lights on, if the lights cost more than cash on hand. Both sides of the equation have to be solved.”

“A writer’s search for journalism in the age of branding.” In which Maureen Tkacik engages in a number of jobs she wouldn’t otherwise take to explore them journalistically and try to get at the heart of the ‘nothing economy’. This is a great piece, and I think the reactions (in the comments and in my knee, occasionally) questioning her ‘legitimacy’ and hypocrisy illuminate the very problem she’s talking about. I think the idea of injecting a journalist experience into a piece are wonderful, because so-called straight journalism is often a myth and because it can make the writing and reading better.

An empathetic profile.

On Cablegate, especially how the Pentagon Papers and our basic societal comprises play. “Whatever happens, though, this is new ground, and needs to be hashed out as an exemplar of the clash of basic principles that it is.”

“Bianca Jagger last week launched a fierce attack on the Guardian for carrying my story about the evidence collected by Swedish police who have been investigating the claims of sexual assault by the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. At the heart of her attack is a repeated claim that we failed to publish exculpatory evidence contained in the police file. Those who have read her piece will have noticed that she does not cite one single example of this missing information. There are two reasons for this. First, she does not know what is in that police file, because she has not read it. Second, if she had, she would know that her claim is simply not true.”

This is pretty traditionalist but she's pretty right.

Wild and sad.

The always-great Matt Thompson on why episodic news content isn't as helpful as laying a contextual groundwork for a story and then letting readers know about events that happen in that framework.

"Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."

Why the reaction to the iPhone leak reflects a much-weakened press and an Apple in bed with the authorities.

DADT is homophobia, and the denial of equal rights to homosexuals is caused by hatred and fear. Period.

"I’ve long assumed that if you followed the news, the stories behind the headlines would become plain."

Basically: Publishing solves a problem that no longer exists, and we don't need newspapers; we need journalism. Amen.

Typically disinterested in the tourism of Maine's lobster festival, DFW gives a great history of the lobster. The bulk of the article, most interestingly, is dedicated to the ethics of boiling a living creature alive (or otherwise killing it) in order to eat it.

An excellent design update for the magazine. I shout this from the The Helvetica Design Is Also Great bandwagon.

"Almost fifteen years after my mandatory military duty ended, I went back to several Israeli army bases, using the medium of photography as a vehicle to re-enter this world."

"Having volunteered for Iraq, Mark Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. Dismayed to learn that his pro-war articles helped persuade Daily to enlist, the author measures his words against a family's grief and a young man's sacrifice."

America's latest "Hitler" is Ahmadinejad, Iraq is Bush's Vietnam, and the NYTimes "failed the First Amendment." "You'd think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again." But "there is no learning."

The sad dumbing-down of one of the most visited and trusted news sources in the country.