Kudos + congrats to my friend Matt, an occasional Phoenix contributor, who graduates this week from Roger Williams Law School.

The RI Populist was today among the winners of the Metcalf Diversity in Media Award (named for former ProJo publisher Michael Metcalf), which are presented for public-interest reporting by Rhode Island for Community and Justice:

Matt Jerzyk and the Rhode Island's Future blog for "Papitto Whistleblowers Punished"

 

Demonstrating the power of the internet in advocacy, Matt used his blog to influence change at Roger Williams University. The Rhode Island's Future website consistently addresses human rights issues and advocacy in a medium for the new millennium. 

Ardent Democrat Matt has also been selected to go to the DNC in Denver:

PAWTUCKET - Rhode Island Democratic Party Chairman Bill Lynch congratulated RIFuture.org founder Matt Jerzyk [yesterday] on being named to the Democratic National Convention's "State Blogging Corps." One blogger was selected by the DNC from every state to accompany the local delegation to the August nominating convention and offer their unique perspective to online audiences that will be closely reading and watching from home.

 

"Matt's done a great job helping to bring new people and new ideas into our party. His site has become a must-read for people who follow politics in Rhode Island, and his sincere passion for social justice and equal rights is truly representative of what the Democratic Party has always stood for," Lynch said.

As I've written, the ProJo's SoxBlog is among the paper's best new-media efforts. There's a lot of content and a steady effort to try new things, such as a daily recorded interview with Sean McAdam, far and away the ProJo's best baseball writer. The downside? McAdam, speaking from some sort of phone while on the road, sounds like he's trapped in a metallic can. Isn't there a way to get better audio for this?

Meanwhile, as someone who has long had an unusually high level of interest in squirrels (due to how a relative had once dubbed a hyper co-worker "the Squirrel"), I appreciated this post from ProJo blog savant Sheila Lennon:

Squirrel for dinner?

Journal / Kris Craig

The ultimate ethical meal: a grey squirrel The Guardian (U.K.) coos,

It tastes sweet, like a cross between lamb and duck. And it's selling as fast as butchers can get it.

That's in England, where the North American Eastern grey squirrel is overrunning their beloved red squirrels. So it's almost patriotic to eat them to help cull the species, at about $6.82 per cleaned squirrel at the butcher shops.

I'm thinking depression-era protein, if things get bad here. Lord knows we have enough grey squirrels eating our tulip bulbs and all the pears from our tree every year.

Texas A&M offers instructions for harvesting acorns, squirrel, opossum and raccoon "(for traditional community coon suppers)", "dressing" and cooking them,:

Squirrel is one of the most tender of all wild game meats. The rosy pink to red flesh of young squirrel is tender and has a pleasing flavor. The flesh of older animals is darker red in color and may require marinating or long cooking for tenderness.

There are recipes for squirrel, although I wouldn't expect much meat from these scrawny city critters.

Here's a recipe for Braised acorn-fed grey squirrel with roasted loin and squirrel pie, garlic mash by Craig James, head chef, at Butlers Wharf Chop House, near Tower Bridge, London.

There's even a review of Butler's squirrel specials in the Evening Standard by restaurant blogger Charles Campion:

During May there is a “squirrel and rook” season. When I visited only the squirrel element had kicked in - and the menu listed “Grey squirrel and rabbit terrine with piccalilli” – the terrine had a good texture, the sweet close-textured squirrel meat ends up pretty much indistinguishable from the rabbit – this would be a great dish for nervous squirrel sensation seekers. On the main course list there is “braised Grey squirrel and Guinness stew with carrots and horseradish dumplings” – very rich and discernibly squirrel, the meat falling from the bones of those long back legs – the dumplings need work, they are a little solid (which need not be a bad quality in a dumpling but can be taken too far) and they also need a bit more of the promised horseradish bite.

UKTV Food offers a recipe for squirrel pancakes, pictured at right.

Other squirrel recipes.

There are reports of prion disease -- Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- in five people from Kentucky who all ate the brains of diseased squirrels. (Hard to know how the squirrels might have acquired it on their diet of nuts and berries, though, so the link may be tentative.) Don't eat the brains if you're being fastidious. (Of course, if you're being fastidious you wouldn't be anywhere near a dead squirrel.) Rabies is rare among squirrels.

How to: Squirrel hunts are great ways to enjoy fall days and teach new hunters field skills. - Wisconson Natural Resources magazine

I've been otherwise occupied most of today. Lugo still sucks. I might get a post of two later, but if not, see you tomorrow.

Just a few days after I took the statewide daily to task for a relative paucity of updates on its politics blog, that particular ProJo site is showing signs of life, particularly with posts from Washington stafter John Mulligan and the estimable Scott MacKay.

See, guys, you can do it!

-- to Brown grad and former Prov Phoenix intern Jessica Grose, now with Gawker's Jezebel, who got some section-front love in the NYT Styles section yesterday.

-- to my Newsmakers colleague, Arlene Violet, whose forthcoming musical was channeled yesterday by Channing Gray in the ProJo.

Providence Daily Dose, although a relative newcomer to blogging, zoomed out of nowhere to win the hearts of Phoenix readers as best blog in our recent Best issue.

Powered by such bright lights as the absinthe-sipping, disc-spinning Eric Smith and David Segal, the coolest guy in the General Assembly (who's having another of his fun fundraisers next week), not to mention Scrabble-happy Beth Comery and the sometimes-salacious Jersey Girls, the Dose is pithy, colorful blog that is well worth your attention. Yeah, they were kind enough to link to my blog story, even though they got but a brief mention.

Here's what Eric had to say in a brief e-mail sound bite:

I'm not really sure how much actual impact our site has had on Providence or history in general, but people seem to appreciate the voice that we're putting out there. I believe we take an interesting slant on politics, local and otherwise and the culture that's out there in this city. We're funny, and there's not much funny and smart stuff out there, really, for folks to get into. Everything is either totally serious or absolutely ridiculous and there's not much in the middle except for us. I'm not sure why that is, people are smart in Providence and they get what we're doing. We're constantly getting complemented on how good our writers are, Ari and Ariel specifically, and I've gotten a few too! People like the Jersey Girls column a lot, and our hit rate has exceeded our original goal and now we need a new goal. I think people just like that we're here, everyday, all day long. Like the Weather Channel.

And here's some of what Segal has to say:

More forums for discussion are necessarily better. Blogs allow for circumvention of the corporate media's filters. I think that they're especially useful at the local -- in RI, without blogs, where would one be able to turn for information, apart from a pretty small number of newspapers and tv stations owned by out-of-state entities?

 

They facilitate a form of point/counter-point that, previously, was impossible --  the ability to link directly to citations, to quotes, to detailed economic analyses, allows for much more rigor.

 

Any open forum -- whether online or at the public square -- will include a lot of static.  And the anonymity of the blogosphere certainly yields a greater propensity for ad hominem attacks and name-calling and misinformation. But it's pretty easy to cut through all of this -- and is almost completely corrected simply by dismissing anything posted under pseudonyms. A regular reader of a particular site is pretty quickly able to learn who's trustworthy and who's not.

My piece on the RI blogosphere has generated a lot of feedback, and as mentioned in a brief sidebar with the print piece, I want to highlight some of the other noteworthy blogs in the Ocean State.

Jack Templin of the Providence Geeks launched RI Nexus last year, and it seems like a great resource for the local tech community and people looking to learn more about it.

Here are some excerpts from a recent e-mail interview betweek Jack and myself:

What has the RI Nexus blog meant for the tech-geek sector/community?

Because info-tech and digital media professionals are early adopters of the blogosphere, we are reaping its benefits both sooner and to a greater extent than other groups. Dozens and dozens of individual RI geeks, as well as the companies they're associated with, have active blogs.

 

RINexus.com is a community and content management system complete with a calendar, a news tracking tool, interactive map of Rhode Island, discussion forums, and a job & internship board. A multi-author blog figures in prominently into the mix. With the RINexus.com blog, we highlight the voices, ideas, and achievements of Rhode Island's burgeoning info-tech and digital media sector. We try to pass the baton around to as many authors as possible. Postings trigger conversations, both online and off. We know that all sorts of business activity that has been catalyzed from RI Nexus blog postings including partnerships, events, sales, hirings, and investments.

How will this influence change going forward?

Keep an eye on the micro-blogging trend that's best represented by Twitter. A lot of Rhode Island Geeks are "twittering" and in doing so creating a whole additional layer of communication that complements both blogging and in-person interactions.

 

Also, note that RI's info-tech and digital media community has a very robust "in person" dimension with all sorts of events, small to large, super casual to slightly more formal. The blogosphere, and online activity in general, has been key to the community creating these rich "real world" happenings and relationships.

As I report in my story on the RI blogosphere, Matt Jerzyk, the leading light of the Rhode Island's Future blog, is looking to sell it. Matt, who is about to graduate from Roger Williams Law School (and as I note in my piece, is a friend and a Phoenix contributor), elaborated this way:

For me, I have given 3 years of my life to getting RI Future off the ground and I am ready to pass the torch sometime in the near future. In fact, I have been talking with interested parties about selling the blog. Ideally, I would like to sell it to someone who will maintain the character and the integrity of the blog. 

 

My goal is to be able to leave the blog and to have nothing change. To accomplish this, I have been trying to find new writers who can reduce my posting workload (shameless plug: contact me if you want to write!) . . . .

 

I am open to all possibilitites with regard to the future of Rhode Island's future. I have heard suggestions ranging from an outright sale to another media organization to the formation of a cooperative of current writers and friends in the progressive community to the idea of a young entrepreneur or current blogger who wants to pick up where I left off. I am currently in "listening" mode and trying to figure out a solution that will be best for RI Future and the progressive blogosphere as a whole.

[Above: Anchor Rising's Justin Katz, Marc Comtois, and Andrew Morse]

Thanks in good measure to the pioneering efforts of Rhode Island's Future and Anchor Rising, the Rhode Island blogosphere continues to grow in variety and sophistication. I look at this trend in this week's Phoenix:

There are, to name a few, locally based blogs for tech geeks and entrepreneurs, the legal community, same-sex marriage proponents, industrial designers, the young and irreverent, Democrats, and Republicans, and those concerned with intellectual property.

For communities sometimes overlooked by the Providence-centric media, the presence of sites such as Hard Deadlines, which focuses on Portsmouth, or RI’s Twelfth, which emphasizes that state Senate district, enrich the information landscape. ....

Picking up on a recent New York Times' story about the unexpected death, in one week, of two middle-aged bloggers, Lee Drutman, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley, used an April 15 op-ed in the ProJo to contend that the constant appetite of the blogosphere is bad for the body politic. ....

To be sure, there are shortcomings to be found on local blogs, particularly a periodic excess of personal attacks and a mix of bitchy and moronic comments, the short observations made by readers, that can be variously tasty or enervating.

Ultimately, though, Rhode Island bloggers rise or fall on their ability to present compelling information and trenchant points of view.

Marc Comtois, a regular contributor to Anchor Rising, sums this up well: “For me, writing a blog post helps me to strengthen my own thought process with regards to what I believe. If I’m going to pre-sent an argument for or against something, I had better be clear why I’m taking the stance I am."

Returning today to the ProJo's op-ep page, Justin makes the case that economic flight is one of the most dire problems facing Rhode Island, and that a fix is needed, pronto.

First, the problem:

• Almost 30,000 fewer Rhode Islanders lived in households earning over three times the poverty level (around $60,000 for a family of four) in 2006 than 2005 (U.S. Census American Community Survey).

• Over that same period, married-with-children households earning more than $100,000 or more a year decreased by 1,033.

• According to tax returns filed in 2005 and 2006 (based on income from 2004 and 2005), Rhode Island lost, on a net basis, 8,296 taxpayers, with an aggregate adjusted gross income totaling $485 million, over those two years (IRS Migration Data). ...

If the trends portrayed in the latest available data have continued, Rhode Island has been losing around 1 percent of its tax-paying population every year since 2004, and those who’ve fled have taken a quarter billion dollars of income with them annually. Stopping this flight must become state and local governments’ Number 1 objective.

One simple solution is to make Rhode Island a more attractive place to live by decreasing the cost of living here (i.e., lowering taxes) and increasing the incentive for businesses to open up shop. Therefore, seeking to drain more tax revenue from commerce and layering taxes on corporations, both of which are “on the table” at the General Assembly, borders on dementia.

A clear consequence of lowering taxes, at least near-term, is that revenue will slip even further below spending. Compensating by taxing the rich more would simply tip the capsizing boat the other way. In 2003, the $75,000-$200,000 and $200,000-plus categories each paid around 35 percent of the total income-tax liability for the state. As the former’s percentage has dropped, the latter’s has increased to over 40 percent. As reluctant as we all may be to take taxpayer-funded services and other public-sector benefits away from those who’ve come to rely on them, our budget must be balanced entirely from the spending column.

Speaking of blogs, congrats to my conservative friends at Anchor Rising for joining N4N and RI's Future in Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza's rating of the top state-based blogs (h/t RI's Future).

And yesterday, Megan Hall of WRNI, who is a prime mover with the local chapter of the Association of Young Journalists, and I sat down to talk about plans for an AYJ-sponsored blogging panel in June. Stay tuned for details.

Art Martone's Sox Blog is a prime example of how a blog based at a MSM daily can do a great job with blogging. Martone is a super-informed baseball observer, his blog is updated frequently, and it's chock full of posts of interest to Sox enthusiasts.

Yet some of us in the local blogosphere continue to wonder why the ProJo, which has a three-person State House staff and a number of other talented staffers who write about politics, does such a lame job with its Politics Blog -- which is rarely updated and consists mostly of reprinting Political Scene.

Now, a new study out of Ball State University (h/t Romenesko) finds that newspapers are generally doing a poor job with their political blogs.

Newspapers will have to change the way they approach blogging if they are going to be a force in increasing public dialogue on political issues, says a new study from Ball State University.

A study of blogs and audience engagement during the week before the fall 2006 elections found that most newspaper staff-produced blogs contained a small number of postings, failed to create much interaction between the blogger and the audience and attracted few audience comments.

In the review of 360 newspapers, Ball State journalism professors Lori Demo and Mary Spillman, found that 42 percent of newspapers had blogs with political content but discovered commitment to blogging widely varied.

"Political blogs are seen as providing a meeting place for journalists interested in promoting the democratic process and readers looking for a chance to share observation and beliefs," Demo said. "These blogs offer individuals an opportunity to communicate outside the dominant media structure found in news stories, staff columns and letters to the editor. To be as effective as some of the more popular citizen-produced blogs, however, newspaper versions must attract an audience and generate a conversation.

"This study provides a snapshot of an emerging newspaper feature during a five-day period before a national election. While much has been written about blogs' potential to save democracy and revive journalism, this picture of newspapers' blog posts does little to support that notion."

The ProJo's lack of a better political blog is all the more surprising given the recognition on Fountain Street that the Web represents the future of the newspaper.

Yet as P+J report this week, the ProJo is apparently focused on ramping up a less than newsy part of projo.com.

It’s P+J’s understanding that Tom Heslin, the Other Paper’s Web ubermensch, has announced that a new women’s portal is in the works, and that it will feature all sorts of hard-hitting featurettes, with titles like “Let’s Chat,” “All About Me,” and “Blush.”
 
Ooooooh, your superior correspondents haven’t been this excited since we received a DVD boxed set of the entire run of The View for Christmas, darlings! To quote from an unsigned (for sooooo many reasons) in-house memo for the aforementioned “Blush” briefing get-together on Fountain Street, “This session will cover such topics as Romance, Dating, Celebrity, Astrology, Surprise, Buzz, Inspire Me!, E-postcards, For Men Only — The Other Team’s Playbook, and anything else you think might appeal to women (and men!) as individuals. When you sign up for this session, think Cosmo, Glamour, Self, Lucky magazines”
 
Wheeee! “Glamour Dos and Don’ts” all around!

The bottom of today's ProJo carries a notice indicating how the daily newsstand price of Rhode Island's dominant daily has climbed to 75 cents, the first such increase in 18 years. Considering the woes of the newspaper industry, this decision was certainly not made lightly.

The problem for newspapers is not that fewer people are reading them. Combined print-Web readership figures are impressive, but newspapers' Web-based advertising is far less profitable than the vanishing amount of dead-tree advertising.

Writing at RI's Future, Forsanri attributes the growth in readership of that site to dissatisfaction with, and distrust of, the MSM. I don't think that's entirely right. While blogs can make a stir with original reporting and commentary, such as Matt's recent post on RI's housing mafia, the blogosphere's growth is more a byproduct of a changing media landscape.

This can be seen in the explosive growth of HuffPost, as today's NYT reports:

When Ms. Huffington, the 57-year-old author and former conservative pundit, announced her plans for The Huffington Post three years ago, many critics dismissed the idea as a digital dinner party for her new liberal friends. But it has grown in ways that few, except perhaps Ms. Huffington herself, expected.

In February, The Huffington Post drew 3.7 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online, for the first time beating out The Drudge Report, the conservative tip sheet with which The Post is often compared. On Technorati, a blog search tool, The Huffington Post is the second-most-linked-to blog, behind only the technology site TechCrunch. As Roy Sekoff, the site’s editor, said, “We’ve always wanted to be part of the national conversation.”

When Barack Obama made his first public remarks about his controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., he did so in a post on the site. “It was immediately picked up everywhere,” Ms. Huffington recalled. “It helps to be bookmarked by the mainstream media.” ....

According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution, the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used. That would put the price at more than $50 for each visitor, a high valuation. Using the site’s internal figures, 14 million unique visitors for the most recent month, the price would be closer to $15 for each user.

This is well and good. In crisis, there is opportunity, and more Facebook and YouTube-style new media darlings will emerge in the months and years to come.

The danger, at least for now, is how very few blogs come remotely close to producing as much original reporting as dead-tree newspapers -- which are steadily downsizing and shrinking their commitments. Maybe TPM will serve as a model for a new way.

Yet even if Governor Carcieri and some of his supporters don't much like the ProJo these days, we should agree that the paper has long played an important role in rooting out corruption and wrongdoing. The shame will be if this tradition fades over time.

Department of Self-Congratulation: your humble blogger and Matt's RI Future have gotten a nice shoutout from the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza in a post on the best of the state-based political blogs. Thanks, Chris.

Kudos and congrats to Tom Shevlin, whose RIReport.com news aggregator is full of fresh improvements, including "feed panels" that display the top headlines from N4N and other top Rhody blogs.

Brown graduate Joshua Micah Marshall, best known for his efforts a pioneering blogger and the leading light of Talking Points Memo, gets his due in today's New York Times:

On Tuesday, it was announced that he had won a George Polk Award for legal reporting for coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys, critics charged under political circumstances. The “tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,” the citation read.

Also last week, the Justice Department put him back on its mailing list for reporters with credentials after removing him last year.

Mr. Marshall does not belong to any traditional news organization. Instead, he is creating his own. His Web site, Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com), is the first Internet-only news operation to receive the Polk (though in 2003, an award for Internet reporting was given to the Center for Public Integrity), and certainly one of the most influential political blogs in the country.

To scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good. Many took it as vindication of their enterprise — that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not. And most reassuringly, it showed that fair numbers of people out there were paying attention.

Mr. Marshall was recognized for a style of online reporting that greatly expands the definition of blogging. And he operates a long way from the clichéd pajama-wearing, coffee-sipping commentator on the news. He has a newsroom in Manhattan and seven reporters for his sites, including two in Washington.

Yet Mr. Marshall does not shy away from the notion of blogging. “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging,” he said, something that can involve matters as varied as the tone of the writing or the display of articles in reverse chronological order. “We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”

Seven years ago, Mr. Marshall was a Ph.D candidate in early American history at Brown University; the Washington editor of a liberal magazine, The American Prospect; and a new blogger. He had started the blog as an outlet for his ideas and to track the recount fight in Florida — the name came from a term bandied about during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“If I had quickly happened into a staff position at The New Yorker, I probably wouldn’t have done this,” Mr. Marshall, 39, said of his migration to full-time online journalism.

In that time, he seems to have followed a business model unlike the founders of many of the dot-coms: Begin as a tiny operation. Manage to gain a following. As the audience grows, ask readers for donations and accept advertising. As the advertising and donations grow, add reporters and features. Repeat as often as needed.

Ads came in fall 2003, when politically conscious Internet users were starting to focus on the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and “I remember there being peak days of 60,000 page views, which was really incredible.”

“Ads started bringing in, in relative terms, a decent income for me relatively quickly,” he said

Soon after there was the first fund-raiser, to cover the cost of reporting on the New Hampshire primary of 2004. It brought in $6,000 in about 24 hours. There were fund-raisers in 2005 to create new projects: TPM Cafe (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com), where readers and experts can debate political issues, and TPMMuckraker (tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo-.com), the site that was kept off the Justice Department’s mailing list. All are grouped under the parent TPM Media.

“The basic model is we are an ad-supported company,” he said. “Often when we want to do some major expansion, we go to readers.”

Traffic has continued to grow. Mr. Marshall said that on average over the last 18 months, the sites have had 400,000 page views a day. He put the number of unique visitors a month at 750,000 (about 60 percent of the traffic of The Nation, a long-established left-wing magazine).

Frequent N4N visitors are aware that I'm a fan of The Page, the presidential-politics blog of Time's Mark Halperin. It's a must-read for political junkies.

Earlier this week, Halperin gave some props to the ProJo's Charlie Bakst, linking to audio of Charlie's interview with Michelle Obama.

Now, with Rhode Island firmly in the potentially decisive primary mix for March 4, the Cicilline story gets some prominent play today on the Page:

Clinton Camp Tells Providence Mayor to Stay Away

Cicilline.com

Mayor David Cicilline — supporter and former state campaign chair — was told he’s barred from her event Sunday for fear his presence would cause protests by local firefighters union.

“It’s obviously something for me to think about very carefully, because I am very disappointed in the decision of the Clinton campaign. I’m not prepared to say more than that today,” Cicilline said.

Matt also has a bit on Governor Carcieri being talked up as a VP possibility for Mitt Romney:

The WaPo's Chris Cillizza has a good run-through of the possible VPs for each candidate.  Look who he has listed for Mitt Romney:

  * Don Carcieri: The Rhode Island governor doesn't get much publicity, but he has been elected and reelected in a VERY blue state and, before getting involved in politics, was a successful businessman. Sound like someone else you know?

Meanwhile, Anchor Rising's Justin today publishes another op-ed in the ProJo, taking folks, including my Newsmakers' colleague, to task:

Steve Aveson likened the decrease of public assistance for undocumented children to a “harsh carrot and stick”; “we deprive children of this support” so that their parents will “get the idea . . . and they’ll go away from Rhode Island.” But even a compassionate welcome can be worn out, and in truth, it only makes sense to devote scarce financial resources to their education and non-emergency health care if our invitation is for them to stay.

But the state’s primary moral obligation is to those who are not strangers, to provide an environment in which they can thrive of their own initiative. Thwarted by vested interests at the voting booth, many Rhode Islanders have been attempting, via moving van, to communicate to those Democrats in the Senate that the budgetary policy statement is unjust. It is on their backs, and at the cost of their aspirations, that Rhode Island’s powerful have been solving their deficit of maturity and failed comprehension of consequences.

As someone with a long-running (and unpaid) connection to the show, I think Justin oversteps in prescribing an advocacy role to Aveson, who like myself and other panelists, uses various rhetorical devices (the ever-popular devil's advocate, for example) in the interest of posing questions and stimulating discussion.

Writing in the Phoenix, Sharon Steel describes how, in a time of global upheaval, many Americans are turning to Hello Kitty, Lolcats, and Juno, among other elements of what she dubs the cuteness surge. 

“We’ve had manifestations of this cute business, through good times and bad, militaristically,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop-culture at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. “We’re living in dangerous times. There’s a fear of terrorism and a war we have no idea how to manage. That’s going to bleed over into lots of different things.” These “cycles of cute,” as Thompson calls them, might transcend the news, though they tend to hint at the gloominess that’s ever-present, regardless of what’s on Page One. 

If there is anything cuter than a photo of a snuggly kitten, it is a photo of a snuggly kitten festooned with intentionally misspelled cutesy text. After sparking an Interweb sensation in early 2007, icanhascheezburger.com has continued to prove its lasting value in Internet meme paydirt. The site began with the posting of a photo, a single pudgy, glassy-eyed, smirking gray feline with the words “I Can Has Cheezburger?” written above the kitty. It may have been accidental, it may have been part of a grand scheme, but either way it was the loudest salvo yet in the recent cuteness surge.

It also birthed the term “lolcat,” a coinage referring specifically to the combination of kitty photos and the intentionally misspelled baby-talk captions that accompanied them. It hasn’t hit Webster’s yet, but urbandictionary.com has five different entries for “lolcat.” (And 37 entries for “lolz.”) No matter which one you trust most, the “lol” root, clearly, comes from Internet abbreviation-speak for “LOL,” meaning “Laugh Out Loud.” OMG!!! Teh kitteh fren-zee iz makin us lolz!

As professor Thompson indicates, there's nothing new about elements of mass distraction. The late Neil Postman described this, pre-Internet era, in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Now, even sober news organizations like the Associated Press are prioritizing Britney.

And while I enjoy a good goof as much as the next person, when it comes to time-wasting, feline-related stuff on the Internet, give me some micro-kitties, set up on a pool table, playing the Vines.

By his own admission, energetic labor activist Pat Crowley, a bete noire for conservative Rhode Islanders, had a little time on his hands recently, so he catalogued the number of blog mentions devoted to him on Anchor and the Ocean State Republican. The answer: 47.

Pat, who clearly wears the other side's opprobrium as a badge of honor, asks whether he should at least get a prize. 

In an reverse image kind of way, I was reminded of how a critic of John Conte, the tightlipped former district attorney of Worcester, Massachusetts, once created a Web site documenting Conte's habitual lack of comment.

Don't get me wrong. I love the speed with which Google, the Internet, and other forms of new technology enable me to find information, and how blogging offers a faster way to break news than through being just in traditional print.

Yet all is not well and good, particularly in the political realm. A number of observers have been weighing in with the viewpoint that, well, things just aren't as good as they used to be.

For example, Steven Stark, writing in the Phoenix, used the mistaken forecasts of the New Hampshire primary to contend that Internet pundits are worsening the quality of political coverage.

With a deficit of real news, the result, as Daniel Boorstin astutely wrote in The Image almost a half-century ago, is that pundits and opiners start making it up, so they have something to write about. This year, we have been blessed, for example, with constant candidate debates that, in real terms, have been watched by virtually no one but those directly involved with the process. Of course, performance in a debate has absolutely no correlation with performance in office, anyway (an idea that has seemingly been lost). But the smaller point is that, this year, it has also had little to do with how candidates do at the ballot box, either.

That still hasn’t stopped the Internet and cable-TV pundits (myself included!) from compulsively grading each one. The process has gotten so out of hand that, after most debates, Fox News now features a focus group of potential voters — each of whom is “wired up” to a machine that looks suspiciously like something out of shock therapy so that he or she can watch the debate and grade it with others. It’s no surprise that these “scientifically chosen” groups have managed to do everything but identify the eventual primary or caucus winner down the road. Yet the pundits are still treating the results of these ludicrous exercises as something worthy of serious reflection.

Even before that, Matt Bai had noted the death of the old-style campaign books, by the likes of Teddy White, Timothy Crouse, and Richard Ben Crameer:

Cramer himself may have been partly to blame. Though “What It Takes” met with unimpressive sales and skeptical reviews (The Boston Globe called it “What It Weighs,” while the Book Review complained about the “grandiose” verbal effects “that would make the early Tom Wolfe blush”), Cramer’s style spawned legions of imitators, all of whom wanted to do their own fly-on-the-wall reporting and italicized riffs, but most of whom weren’t nearly as scrupulously accurate or as keenly attuned to the human psyche. Often, their pieces left their subjects feeling exploited, to the point where candidates and their handlers quickly became wary of being psychoanalyzed by amateurs or having their ugliest private moments played up for maximum effect.

This breakdown of trust between politicians and reporters, however, probably had less to do with Cramer’s influence than with the moment in American politics he just happened to capture. The cold war was ending, the age of the satellite truck and the 24-hour news cycle was just beginning, and politics, like everything else in the society at large, was becoming more trivialized and more celebrity-driven. A new generation of political journalists was taking over, one reared in the era after Watergate, when taking down a politician, any politician, was considered the pinnacle of a career.

And then there are those, like Andrew Keen, who contend, as argues the subtitle of his book, The Cult of the Amateur, that today's Internet is killing our culture:

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

Let's face it: there's no turning back technology. Yet it's also worth considering the consequence of so-called "progress."

BlogNetNews, an aspiring national blog aggregator, has launched a Rhode Island site. It has all your faves -- RI's Future, Anchor Rising, Daily Dose, Belo Blog, and, yes, N4N.

A fellow named David Mastio dropped me an e-mail with the following skinny:

The heart of the site is an aggregator that reposts the begining of the latest posts from blogs across the state and then links back to the originating blog for readers who want to check out the whole thing. There's also a search engine on the top right and and on the left a variety of statistics on what is going on in the Rhode Island blogosphere. In the "services" tab on the left sidebar, you'll find the code to put the Rhode Island search engine on your site, as well as a Rhode Island blogger headline widget.

 

You'll hear from me again in a few weeks when we have wrapped up building out all the states (seven more to go I think), we're building a national platform that will let readers quickly find the latest posts from blogs writing about every U.S. House, Senate and Governors race in the country written by local bloggers actually on the scene. (If you want to play with the programming we're using for this, you can see some of the innards at www.blognetnews.com/feedcentral.

Thanks to our friends at the Providence Daily Dose, we learn that this blog, one year after bursting on the scene, comes up tops when you Google for "Not for Nothing."

The bygone year was a big one in the RI blogosphere, if I may say so, with the addition of sites such as N4N and Providence Daily Dose. Now, in today's ProJo, Ed Fitzpatrick describes how citizen-activist Anne Grant is pushing the boundaries of the local blogosphere -- and how state government is pushing back.

The divorce and custody case involving children “Sara Doe” and “Mary Doe” might have remained just another of the bitter battles that play out in Family Court, deeply personal and unnoticed by the public.

But a retired minister began a blog that blasted the state Department of Children, Youth and Families and others involved in the case, saying they’d used a “bogus theory” to take a mother’s two daughters from her and to send one of the sisters to live with the father — after the father had been accused of sexually abusing the girl.

At DCYF’s request, a Family Court judge ordered the state agency to “advise” the Rev. Anne Grant to stop publishing the blog “as it pertains” to the two children. While the blog used fake names for the girls, DCYF said the blog included the children’s photographs, diary entries and medical information, and the site repeated the sexual abuse claim that a DCYF hearing officer had deemed “unfounded.”

Now, Ms. Grant — who heads the Parenting Project based at the Mathewson Street United Methodist Church in Providence — is asking the state Supreme Court to overrule Family Court Judge John A. Mutter, saying his order violates her constitutional rights to due process and freedom of speech.

And so, the case is emerging into a broader legal battle, which addresses both the right to free speech on the Internet and the privacy rights of children in Family Court. Each side says it is trying to protect the children.

“There is no question the Internet and blogging are the new frontier in free speech law,” said Rodney A. Smolla, a First Amendment scholar and dean of the law school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. “One obvious reason is the kind of statement that used to be made in backyard gossip or around the water cooler can now be spread around the world. I think the courts are in the midst of an ongoing effort to translate traditional free-speech doctrines into this new arena.”

Grant's form of muckraking is bound to remain a relatively smaller presence on the blogosphere, what with TV celebrity-gossip shows and other sites moving into the arena. On a related note, the New York Times' Styles section today asks the weighty question: "Has Gawker jumped the snark?" With a variety of bitchy, gossipy sites about the media and other fancies, Gawker Media has attracted a lot of page views, offering an example of how to build a new-media biz. (It seems to be a popular read for at least one of the Dosers, considering how PDD went there for their Britney news, rather than finding it closer to home.)

Anyway, with success come the inevitable backslide and new challenges:

There are certainly signs that Gawker, delivering a daily dose of gossip and commentary about the news business and selected celebrities since 2002, is in the midst of a particularly intense period of turmoil, which has led to a slide in its once-hypnotic influence on the news media world.

Before the wave of staff departures at Gawker, New York magazine published an article in October ascribing the site’s popularity to the resentment of the city’s “creative underclass,” and asked whether pandering to the nasty impulses of those who covet an increasingly rare slot among the news media establishment troubled the souls of Gawker’s writers.

N+1, a culture journal, followed with a thoroughly researched essay noting how Gawker’s voice has changed with successive editors, descending from a homespun blog that smartly sniped about editors like Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, whose prominence arguably opened them to sarcastic comment, to its current state as a cruel behemoth, eviscerating low-level editors and people’s children.

Through all of the years, changes in editorship and complaints about inaccuracies, traffic still grew. According to statistics available through a link on Gawker and older statistics provided by a former Gawker employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid Mr. Denton’s wrath, the site logged about 700,000 page views in August 2003, the last month of the founding editor, Elizabeth Spiers. A year later, there were 2.8 million pages views, which grew to 5.4 million in August 2005 and to almost 9 million in August 2006.

From Markos:

Hillary is my least favorite of the viable candidates on substantive grounds, and I'll be voting for Barack Obama here pretty soon here in California via absentee ballot. The second-to-last thing I want is Mark Penn and Terry McAluiffe anywhere near the White House. (The last thing? Another Republican administration.)

But the more assholish her detractors behave, the more you help her. The way she was treated the past few days in New Hampshire was a disgrace, and likely a large reason for her surprise victory. So keep attacking her for bullshit reasons, and you'll be generating more and more sympathy votes for her. Obama's "you're likable enough" was likely worth 2-3 points all by its lonesome self.

In May 2006 I wrote this in the Washington Post:

In person, Clinton is one of the warmest politicians I've ever met, but her advisers have stripped what personality she has, hiding it from the public. Some of that may be a product of her team's legendary paranoia, somewhat understandable given the knives out for her. But what remains is a heartless, passionless machine, surrounded by the very people who ground down the activist base in the 1990s and have continued to hold the party's grassroots in utter contempt.

In New Hampshire, her campaign seems to have realized that there's value in giving people a look at that personality. The decision to open up may have been "calculated", but what's behind the steel curtain is a genuinely warm, likable human being. I know this from first-hand experience.

The more she's attacked on personal grounds, the more sympathy that real person will generate, the more votes she'll win from people sending a message to the media and her critics that they've gone way over the line of common decency. You underestimate that sympathy at your own peril. If I found myself half-rooting for her given the crap that was being flung at her, is it any wonder that women turned out in droves to send a message that sexist double-standards were unacceptable? Sure, it took one look at Terry McAuliffe's mug to bring me back down to earth, but most people don't know or care who McAuliffe is. They see people beating the shit out of Clinton for the wrong reasons, they get angry, and they lash back the only way they can -- by voting for her.

The vote for the two "change" candidates outstripped the vote for the two "experience" candidates. I'm with change. I have no interest in seeing behavior that, in essence, helps the status quo.

-- Thanks to the ProJo's Political Scene (second item) for today crediting N4N for first reporting how Providence City Solicitor Joseph M. Fernandez is in the AG hunt for 2010.

-- Blogging can be stressful. Today's New York Times has the details:

Om Malik’s blog, GigaOm, regularly breaks news about the technology industry. Last week, the journalist turned blogger broke a big story about himself. Mr. Malik, 41, blogged that he had suffered a heart attack on Dec. 28.

“I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since,” Mr. Malik wrote. “With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be O.K.”

His heart attack — and his blogging about it — raises the issue of what happens when a blogger becomes a name brand.

“The trouble with a personal brand is, you’re yoked to a machine,” said Paul Kedrosky, a friend of Mr. Malik’s who runs the Infectious Greed blog. “You feel huge pressure to not just do a lot, but to do a lot with your name on it. You have pressure to not just be the C.E.O., but at the same time to write, and to do it all on a shoestring. Put it all together, and it’s a recipe for stress through the roof.”

Mr. Malik has 12 employees, including a chief operating officer, and editors run some of his blogs, Yet, “It’s his name on the door,” Mr. Kedrosky said. “People want to know what Om Malik thinks. People want to see posts with Om Malik’s byline.”

Paul Walborsky, the chief operating officer for Mr. Malik’s company, Giga Omni Media, played down stress as a factor in Mr. Malik’s health. He noted Mr. Malik’s incessant smoking of cigars and cigarettes was a more likely cause.

-- In another reflection of the changing media landscape, Dan Kennedy has the scoop on how "Boston.com political blogger James Pindell is leaving to take a job as national managing editor of something called Politicker.com."

Here's the announcement.

Pindell writes the Primary Source blog for Boston.com. Some of his stories appear in the Boston Globe as well. Keep an eye on him: He's one of the more interesting young people working in Web-based journalism today, having covered the New Hampshire primary in 2004 as editor of the late, lamented PoliticsNH.com.

As I tell my students, this may be a lousy time to pursue a traditio