Eric Alterman in The Nation explores the whole "are bloggers journalists?" debate in the context of the Eason Jordan fallout, and how MSM's problem has been its irresistible tendency to feed into its own misfortune.

Excerpt:

Moreover, while the MSM machers have traditionally played the role of gatekeeper, keeping malevolent nuts out of the public square, they have undeniably fallen down on the job of late. It was on CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer that the satanic spawn Ann Coulter was invited to giggle about how nice it would be if the US military really were deliberately murdering journalists.



Nice piece in the Post today about the spreading influence of iPod culture - funny how even the name now is synonymous with MP3/digital music players regardless of the actual origin of the hardware.

On a related note, this is one of those sorts of services mentioned in the piece. Slightly worrying, however, that among the testimonials is:

"It felt like Alessandra had a psychic connection to my soul, rather than just the information she'd gathered from our consultations"

Yikers!



Further to yesterday's note on registration for premium sites, and whether subscribers were actually being penalised by being unable to share links to content behind the wall, check out BugMeNot.com which encourages the sharing of registration/sign-in information as a way of getting around just that problem.

Also take a look at the interesting discussion over at Poynter on the ethics of it all.



And talking about penalising online subscribers relative to the print edition, Linda informs me that the story of the by now legendary skiing nuptials was accompanied in dead-tree form by a photograph of the protagonists going downhill fast, as it were...

(and in any case, weren't they an '80s punk band? The Legendary Skiing Nuptials?)


And, yes, snowing again. Not here, though... (sigh...)


I might even be able to brave the snow for lunch here today, however...