My friend Marc sends a great Molly Ivins quote from the other day:

"I tune in regularly to listen to William F. Buckley, Mona Charen, George Will, Rush Limbaugh, John Sununu, John McLaughlin, Pat Buchanan, Gordon Liddy, James Kilpatrick, Robert Novak, Pat Robertson, Paul Harvey, and Phyllis Schlaffly talk about how more conservative voices are needed because of the liberal slant of the media."

In similar vein, check out this Q&A piece from MediaBistro about Eric Alterman's new book.

Also - I know it's been around for a couple of days, but it's worth browsing this piece from the Washingtonian Online about news organisations' disaster recovery plans in the event of an attack on the nation's capital.

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Following on from what we were saying the other day about charging models and the need for information to be free - or not - a piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review by Michael Scherer gives us some insights that back up what we've been thinking in terms of the contest between on and offline news sources and how its likely to play out.

He reports recent research that shows "a poll of online newspaper readers under the age of thirty found that 31 percent had reduced their print readership because the same material is online."

Given newspapers' already declining circulation figures, Scherer argues: "At stake is nothing less than the future of print journalism."

A little melodramatic, perhaps, but it's clear where he's coming from.

Joe has passed along an interesting site.

Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. Attorney General during the Johnson administration has drafted articles of impeachment alleging "high crimes and misdemeanors by President Bush and other civil officers of his administration".

Votetoimpeach.org could be this year's MoveOn.

Just as Reagan committed or endorsed many more acts that were deserving of impeachment than Clinton ever did, the current president - who, don't forget, came to power after losing the popular vote - runs the risk of using the cloak of the war on terror to justify actions which in normal circumstances should at least be subject to appropriate oversight.

Today's story about the latest supposed tape of Bin Laden will just add more fuel to the fire.

Just as the story here in London today, about the army virtually taking over Heathrow Airport because of intelligence reports of a possible gound-to-air missile attack on a plane, has managed to bump the Nato row off the top of the news agenda.


Best wishes to John Kerry for a speedy recovery.

I went to his official website for more info, but it hasn't been updated for 24 hours. Somebody on his campaign team dropped the ball. More than anything, supporters and potential contributors need some reassaurance when a candidate makes that sort of announcement. It should have been all set up in advance.

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Nice aside on the episode of The Simpsons I watched tonight.

Homer calls a voice-activated stock checker line and at the prompt says the name of the company he's just invested his life savings in: "Animotion". "Up one-eighth", says the voice.

"Woo-Hoo" says Homer. "Yahoo - up thirteen", says the voice.

"Hey. What is this crap?" says Homer, to which the voice replies: "Fox Broadcasting - down sixty-four".

My former colleague, the always-ahead-of-his-time Nick Denton, has some interesting things to say about what he calls "nano-publishing" and the direction of individualised, post-blog web content, driven by economies of scale and niche audiences.

It also has fundamental implications for the concept of charging, and whether or not purchasing content form these sorts of sites - assuming an efficiently functioning micropayment system - might be one of the ways ahead for generating revenue in the online world.

One of Nick's latest projects is Gawker , which is fast becoming the must-read daily chronicle of cultural life in my previous hometown....The Guardian likes it, and draws some interesting conclusions on the future of blogging and thin media - mainstream and otherwise.

Had a lecture today with my brilliant head of department Prof James Curran and he made me think about an interesting point when we were talking about Lawrence Lessig and the concept of privacy and personal space on the net.

What often gets overlooked in the big brother debate is that while information 'wants to be free', you can't underestimate the degree to which people will voluntarily surrender their personal details in order to use specific sites. Content that folks would run a mile from paying for, they'll happily give up all manner of data which could be just as valuable.

But one of the inevitable by-products as the dot.com boom became unsustainable was that as users became more sophisticated, they became aware of ways to ignore constant spam and pop-up ads; while at the same time the idea of data capture became progressively less valuable - what's the point of collecting detailed information on a reader if you're only using it to try to sell them something, rather than enhancing their online experience?

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