I collect southern colorful southern sayings like, "he's so stupid, he couldn't find his ass with a search warrant." Still one of my favorites. One of the more recent additions to my collection is, "...even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while."

I was reminded of that one after reading Matt Tiabbi's devastating mockery of Tom Friedman of the New York Times. I enjoyed a couple of Friedman's earlier books--"From Beirut to Jerusalem" and "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", in which he respectively makes some good first hand observations about the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the post-cold war global economy. Yet I was flummoxed even then, by Friedman's non sequiturs. The man just didn't seem capable of arriving at a logical conclusion from his own data.

I haven't bought a book of his since then, which might have something to do with the fact that he's republished "The Lexus and Olive tree" three times under three different titles. Ain't it strange that liberal Democrats are so often such greedy bastards? Ain't it stranger that they still manage to be so sanctimonious in the process?

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a **** Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

And you thought it was just Al Gore...

This is William Kristol’s last column.

Those words were tacked on to his most recent column for the New York Times, and thus the strange bedfellows elect to sleep apart.

No word so far as to whether Kristol left, was fired, or came to some kind of mutual agreement. Its pretty clear that the New York Time's slide into oblivion continues unabated, Kristol's contribution notwithstanding. Kristol for his part, has to recognize that being a New York Times columnist doesn't impart the prestige that it used to.

When Kristol joined the Times last year, I thought it was emblematic of their complete cluelessness with regards to the conservative movement. Kristol has no constituency among conservatives. His "value" was as a policy-wonk, and since Obama isn't going to implement any conservative or neo-conservative policies, he's pretty much out of work. Kristol will continue making a living off of Newcorps' various investments, but I think his star, which rose with Bush, is setting with him as well.

UPDATE: Jealous out-of-work, or underemployed liberal scribes are mocking Kristol, ascribing his departure to "bad writing" and lack of due diligence.

Let's be candid shall we? The New York Times didn't hire Bill Kristol to write a column because they thought he was a good writer and always checked his facts. They hired him because of what he knows, who he knows and who he is--the same as the Washington Post.

If they let him go, it was certainly not because he credited Michelle Malkin with something Michael Medved said. It was because he doesn't bring anything to the party anymore.

Its just so ironic that his critics are so clueless about the nature of their business, which explains why their blogging and not writing columns for the New York Times.

Of course these guys credit an inside source of unknown authority for their assessment of the situation, even as the Times flat-out tells you what happened.

“It was mutual agreement,” Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, said of the change. “We discussed this before the election, and decided that we would end now.”

Notably that fits in perfectly with my analysis--Kristol's value at the times was at an end when Obama won the Presidency.

Considering how partisan the New York Times has proven itself, I found it immensely strange when they hired Bill Kristol to write a column.

The assumption is that they still want a conservative perspective on the editorial page, and David Brooks ain't it. That's breeding a conversation about who can and should replace Kristol.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform doesn't want the Times to hire another idiosyncratic voice. If the Gray Lady is looking for a conservative viewpoint on the page, he says, "you can't have Fanta in there; you need classic Coke." He thinks David Brooks is interesting, but "you can't read him and have any understanding of why Boehner and Mitchell and the NRA do what they do." He's similarly skeptical of emerging conservative thinkers who pose sweeping revisions to conservative ideology. ("Get elected dog catcher and then tell me these ideas are going to work for everyone.") His pick for a conservative that could best articulate the party's stance would be Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is publishing its last paper edition ttoday, joining the Rocky Mountain News and several other smaller papers in giving up a one hundred and forty-six year traditional business model. Instead, SeattlePI.com will become a web-only product hard to distinguish from the Huffington Post.

The Seattle PI has seen its circulation decline from 200,000 to 117,000 and in fact the decline might be even more precipitous is one accounts for the changes in accounting rules for circulation. On the other hand, its on-line operations log 50 million page views a year, so its clear that some value exists in the brand.

The real question is, how much value?

Obama's Press Secretary tweaks the tail of a big bad wolf he thinks has the measure of:

“You're not going to find very many of these newspapers and truth within 25 words of each other,” Gibbs continued.

Gibbs didn't need to set this up. The UK Press now has a vested interest in contrasting the truth of their stories with the truth of his. He will lose.

UPDATE - from The Daily Telegraph's response:

Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

Robert Gibbs' completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.

For all its talk of "raising America's standing" in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America's public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs - you've just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President's message.

A remarkable analysis of the failure of Rocky Mountain News by its former President and Publisher.

Remarkable for its candor, but not really for its insights. Traditional print news has learned how to use the web, but none of that changed the intractable economic problems caused by new media. You simply can't extract those old-timey revenues from the web.

Businesses are in fact, small cultures that have developed to fill a particular economic niche. Change the environment, and invariably the business organisms that have evolved to fill that niche will simply go extinct.

John Temple makes all the typical mistakes--even now. He insists that the problem lay in the newspapers truncated vision of their business as "print edition", but fails to recognize that a business isn't a vision of itself, but a machine for making money. Regardless of the vision or the technology, if you aren't booking the revenues, its just a really cool hobby.

I am frankly quite surprised that we are "still here" at this point, wondering about how to make the news business pay. I think the answer is pretty simple--people pay according to scarcity. What this translates to in the information business is "information that nobody else has...", and not just a scoop here and there, but in a consistent way.

Rupert Murdoch gets it. His purchase of the Wallstreet Journal implicitly recognized that business news fits the model of scarce information. He can leverage that scarce information across many different platforms and extract revenues from all of them, with the medium being essentially irrelevant.

I was reminded of this dynamic the other day while using Google. Google is great at finding stuff that people want other people to have access to, but if I want to find truly valuable information, I'm just out of luck. The stuff really worth knowing just isn't there, and for obvious reasons--its valuable, and thus not freely shared.

Ironically, for all the criticism its gets for its outdated web presence, the Drudge Report is the real model for a modern information business. Drudge and its many derivative sites, commonly exploit networks of hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands of correspondents to consistently elicit rare information. Drudge doesn't pay these people a nickel, but simply provides a vast national (and international) audience for a prospective whistle-blower to avail themselves of. More than a few media whales have admitted that they check Drudge the first thing when they come into the office.

...and that's the way it is.

Nielson Business Media has sold off a number of its properties and shuttered two, including the venerable Editor & Publisher.

Editor and Publisher has been a trade magazine for newspaper journalists for over 100 years, and its left-wing slant has been an interesting commentary on the industry as a whole.

Now its a different kind of interesting commentary--the state of the traditional newspaper industry, which can no longer effectively support a trade magazine.

Considering that there are thriving trade magazines for handmade greeting cards, dogs, cats and just about every innocuous interest one can imagine, the failure of a E&P is a devastating indictment of the state of print journalism. Basically, E&P had no value, making it unsaleable and leaving Nielson little choice but to put it out of its misery.

Anyone want to start a trade magazine for bloggers? Oh wait! There already is one.

UPDATE: I thought this was interesting.

A few people have called attention to the fact that "Editor & Publisher" is now one of the top trending topics on Twitter, along with "Christmas" and "Tiger Woods." Perhaps more evidence that's there's a disproportionate number of journalists on Twitter.

ANOTHER UPDATE: While journos wonder what the future holds, it appears to be unfolding right in front of them...

When Andrew Breitbart launched Big Government in September, we asked if he was gearing up to be the next Arianna Huffington: An opinion blog rainmaker with a one-stop digital powerhouse, but presented from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Three months later, hyperbole has become reality as Breitbart is adding to his network of vertical blogs. The newest site to join the Breitbart network is “Big Journalism,” which will launch in January of next year. His target is much bigger than HuffPo — or any other website for that matter. Breitbart is gunning for the institution of mainstream media, or what he calls “the Democratic-media complex.”

This guy needs a sabbatical.

Today we started removing items from our free Web site - comics, letters to the editor, puzzles, TV grid and letters to the editor.

The idea is to wean people off the free Web site and either get them to buy the print version or the e-edition, which is just a PDF of the paper.

Anyone have any experience doing this? What do you think of taking editorials off the free site?

We haven't figured out a way to charge for the whole Web site, so I think we're going with this piece-meal approach until we do.

Thoughts?

Mark C. Mahoney
Editorial Page Editor
The Post-Star
Lawrence & Cooper Sts.
Glens Falls, NY 12801
518.742.3220
Blog: Your Right to Know: www.poststar.com/blogs/?cat=50

Yeah, I have a thought. Spend some time on the Internet browsing newspaper sites. Notice anything? Keep at it--you'll get it before long.

Reading this article crystallizes something a lot of informed Americans have known for a long time.

If you want to know what's going on in this country, you have to read British newspapers...

Long story short; the Washington Post hires a blogger to cover the conservative blogosphere and is embarrassed when he turned out to be your garden variety lefty hater.

Weigel's comments on a left-wing journalist email forum were outed, removing the pretense of fair coverage of the conservative movement--as if it wasn't patently obvious to begin with.

I don't think the motivation can be more clearly described than Don Surber's take:

There was no journalism being practiced by Dave Weigel in this blog. The Washington Post Online hired this guy to make fun of the Right in order to entertain the Left and to re-assure liberals of how superior they are morally and intellectually to the godful mouth-breathing horde on the other side of the political fulcrum.

Facebook is providing me an up-close-and-personal look at the maniacal hatred the left engages in as a matter of course. These are deeply disturbed people--angry all the time, and totally comfortable with dehumanizing anyone who doesn't instantly praise their most casual opinion.

The only reason to correspond with them, is to embarrass them for the benefit of all the lurkers.

Ironically, the taproot of that anger is fundamentally a classically conservative response to a world changing around them in ways they simply can't comprehend. Everything they "know" is wrong and there is panic at the thought that their entire lives have been wasted worshiping false gods. Keynesian economics is working about as well as it did in the 1930s. Socialized medicine isn't evoking hallelujahs from the downtrodden masses, and the 'good' elected Democrats that would restore balance to the force have turned out to be nothing more than criminals and buffoons.

We are left with a torrent of rhetoric largely consisting of condemnations for racism, ignorance and bad hygiene.

Yet worst of all--no one is listening to them. CNN goes back to the dog-eared playbook of the left-wing media and hires the smartest liberal they can find and matches him with a strawman conservative, or in this case a straw woman conservative in the guise of the unread Kathleen Parker. It may be balm for the tortured souls of besieged socialists, but it most closely resembles calls for more sacrifices and devotion to Baal to keep away the invading armies, droughts and other imminent dooms inexorably descending upon them.

Everything that used to work, doesn't work anymore, and they are stumped as to what, if anything they can do to turn the tide.