The weird thing about weather is that there’s a pretty simple non-technological way to determine it: look out the window. And if that doesn’t suffice, there’s probably a widget for it. But don’t insult our intelligence by trying to ramp up page views with a paragraph on the weather.

Oh, and Department of Revenue press releases and WDOT advisories aren’t far behind in my book. The worst thing you can do if you have a blog — far worse than if it were a newspaper — is make it boring. You guys just did that.

President Obama’s historic appearance on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” was accompanied by a foot-in-the-mouth quip about the Special Olympics he later regretted.

Talking about his dismal bowling skills, Obama said he’d been practicing and had gotten his score up to 129.

“Oh, no, that’s very good,” Leno told Obama.

“It was like the Special Olympics or something,” Obama joked, drawing laughter from the funnyman and his audience.

Actually, I didn’t notice Leno laughing . . . maybe because he knows better than to make an unfunny schoolyard crack about the Special Olympics.

Which all is what it is — no offense intended obviously — but somehow the Times missed that part of the interview . . . strange, because it was probably the most interesting thing he said. (Later on, the Times television critic Alessandra Stanley filed this review (not included in the print edition) that mentioned an “implolitic” moment in the second-to-last paragraph.)

But seriously folks, here’s the takeaway — President Obama shouldn’t try so hard to be liked or be funny. It’s unbecoming of a President. Let Bob Dole be funny. Let John McCain want to be liked. I don’t expect much from Presidents, but this is one thing I kind of demand. And the sad thing is that I think Bush 43, of all people, really understood this.

Obama is many things — Hope! Change! Etc.! — basically a lot of stuff that we all aspire to be or aspire, uh, something or other. What he should not be is the first 84 minutes of The Ringer.

Today begins the first day of a “journalism adventure” and one that I hope succeeds. Which also is to say that some of the hand-wringing about the death of print media is kind of overwrought. In my hometown, Phoenix lost its second newspaper back in the 1980s when the Phoenix Gazette folded. Back in the 1980s, the Gazette had no “web-only” option to fall back on. The P-I does. That’s a good thing. Try not to fuck it up. At least 20 newsroom employees’ jobs depend on it.

Several of us in the BATP constellation have been watching the bad news over the last couple of months about print media and discussing it — some of us don’t read a physical newspaper anymore, some of us do (I use mass transit each day, so I do; I still need something to read) — but it’s kind of clear how antiquated the delivery system is. A while back I was stunned to hear that printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle. That is stunning. No, really stunning.

So that said, I hope Hearst isn’t just scuttling the franchise, because this is a real opportunity to try something new. And outside of the Bay Area maybe, I can’t think of another place in the country that isn’t more technologically savvy than Seattle. Go with it.

But go big. Real big. Make sure every single article is permalinked and let the website make assloads of cash on content that’s already there. The now-defunct New York Sun is just sitting there online with big 300-pixel ads on the right margin collecting hits.

As a web-only entity, the Post-Intelligencer can’t argue that they’re losing subscribers to the internet, since that’s all they’re doing. Embrace it. And while you’re at it, why not consider putting everything from its 146-year history online? The New York Times recently made available its .pdf’ed ProQuest articles dating back to 1851 online and it’s fantastic — it’s an amazing archive that researchers and interested people can now access. And if you pay attention to Google, you’ll see that the Times’ articles have kind of body-snatched search queries since the paper went big online. Now perhaps an article from Seattle in the 1800s isn’t a big Google search hit, but it could be. Go with that, too. It’s worth a try.

In short, I want to believe. Let’s do this . . .

“Fuck new media,” the coordinator of the RW1 program, Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as “playing with toys,” according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

Chris Orr at TNR says this is “gross professional malfeasance” to not teach J-school students about the internet.

I take Goldman’s comments somewhat differently. It seems to me what he was saying is that writing and reporting chops are necessary no matter what the medium. And I think that’s true. There are a lot of bloggers out there — even some successful ones — who could use some help on the basics. Theoretically, solid reporting and writing skills are transferrable to any medium. That’s what you go to school for, not to to learn how to tag a post in WordPress.

It was a bookend moment.

President Obama on Monday evening became the 10th American president to call on Helen Thomas at a White House news conference. And he was the first to call on Sam Stein, a reporter for The Huffington Post, whose Internet publication sprung to life during Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

. . .

Mr. Obama glided through the questions without making any obvious news. Then, he turned to Mr. Stein, 26, who last month became the White House correspondent for his publication.

“Are you willing to rule out — right here and now — any prosecution of Bush administration officials?” Mr. Stein said, asking whether Mr. Obama intended to endorse an investigation by a so-called Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

As he did with Ms. Thomas, Mr. Obama essentially bypassed the question, saying, “My general orientation is to say let’s get it right moving forward.”

It was not the answer but the very fact that he took a question from Mr. Stein that created a buzz and signaled yet another shift in the ever-evolving news media landscape.

Meaning lost on me!
But for some battleground states
McCain limericks?

Or . . .

Pretentious poems,
Nugatory responses;
Your Times op-ed page!

*Don’t ask me . . .

Fans here had waited 25 years for a championship parade down Broad Street. The Phillies gave them one Friday, and so many fans showed up that they nearly shut down the city.

. . .

The parade drew fans from beyond the region, too. Greg Packer, 44, of Huntington, N.Y., drove in for Game 5 of the World Series and stayed for the celebration. He arrived on Broad Street near City Hall at 5 a.m. to secure what he considered the best spot.

“In New York right now, we have no Mets, no Yankees, no stadiums,” he said. “I came here to represent and cheer our neighbors.”

But even worse than a hack Greg Packer quote — one of zillions — is that the hack Times writer missed the true quote of the day. Lame!

“Liberal media”, my a**.

[Thanks to listener Curt for the link.]

Barack Hussein Obama, a freshman senator who defeated the first family of Democratic Party politics with a call for a fundamentally new course in politics, was nominated by his party on Wednesday to be the 44th president of the United States.

Can Martha Stewart take a pie in the face — even one she baked herself? Fine Living Network is about to find out.

On Sept. 16, Fine Living will unveil a new original comedy series built around a provocative premise: mocking Ms. Stewart. For a half hour, two hosts will critique — in “candid and often acerbic” language, according to the channel — old clips from her 1990s cooking and craft show. Fine Living, part of the E. W. Scripps Company, calls the series “Whatever, Martha!”

For Fine Living, a fast-growing but small channel available in about 50 million homes, the endeavor comes with a built-in punch line that doubles as an insurance policy. The co-hosts of “Whatever, Martha!” are Ms. Stewart’s daughter, Alexis Stewart, and Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, who is the daughter of the chairman of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Charles Koppelman.

Martha Stewart is not widely known for her sense of humor. But she is in on this particular joke. In fact, she created it, dreaming up the premise after watching reruns of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” during a sleepless night. That series, produced from 1988 to 1999, delivered sarcastic commentary about old horror movies, and had blossomed into a cable cult hit.

“They promised not to be mean, and I had to trust them,” Ms. Stewart said in an interview. “I’m not going to have a heart attack.”

Mr. Russert had led “Meet the Press,” the oldest continuous program on television, since 1991. Under Mr. Russert, “Meet the Press” had become a source of prestige for NBC as the premier place for newsmakers and political candidates to make their case to the nation. It also provided financial value for the network, generating tens of millions in profit every year.

And why not? Boeing, GE, ADM and ConocoPhillips are eager to get their message out to the elite audience. Just don’t expect the next anchor to ever question a Senator as to why the Department of Defense is spending more money than we’ve spent since World War II, even adjusting for inflation. That might piss off the advertisers.

The game’s the game.

Lizza has the audacity to suggest that it’s the journalist’s job not only to “report” on the “controversy,” regarding Obama’s pastor, but to actually inform viewers that these guys are actually different people. Lizza says, “If Barack Obama had said it, he’d be out of this race. I don’t remember him saying it. A guy who was his ex-pastor said it, Chris.”

Needless to say, Matthews is dumbfounded. He genuinely thinks that the job of the media is to just mindlessly parrot the “controversy” and not actually ascertain any facts about it.

Part of the problem here is that Matthews seems to have an outdated view of his role in the media ecosystem. He still holds on to the quaint notion that informing the public about the issues is being taken care of somewhere else in the ecosystem — the nightly news perhaps. Increasingly, though, Matthews is the ecosystem, at least in terms of reporting on national government politics and policy. He’s on the NBC morning shows, the Sunday shows, the nightly news. In other words: they’re all pundits now. They’re all talking about the horserace, the meta-narrative, etc. No one’s actually minding the store!

[And to make matters worse, you've got nattering bloggers like me commenting on Matthews. I'ts meta-meta-narrative!]

That’s not to say we don’t have any good reporters in this country. Dana Priest and Dexter Filkins are doing yeoman’s work trying to keep some semblance of the fourth estate stitched together. But they get drowned out by Matthews’ loud, rambling voice.

Of course, the debate was watched by some 10 million people, the most of any debate thusfar. No doubt ABC will offer this statistic as “proof” that the questions were valid, conveniently ignoring the fact that people tuned in without quite knowing what gasbags Stephanopolous and Gibson would turn out to be.

Update: Kevin Drum says the same thing, but with more evidence:

People tuned in to the debate before they had any idea what the moderators were going to do with it. And it was almost certainly the highest rated debate of the year because (a) it was on ABC, not cable, (b) it was in prime time in all time zones, (c) it’s been nearly two months since the last one, and (d) interest in the Democratic race is at a fever pitch because it’s coming down to the wire and it’s the only game in town.

Matthews is as pure a political being as there is on TV. He is the whip-tongued, name-dropping, self-promoting wise guy you often find in campaigns, and in the bigger offices on Capitol Hill or K Street. (“Rain Man,” NBC’s Brian Williams jokingly called Matthews, referring to his breadth of political knowledge.) He wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter, worked as a top advisor to Tip O’Neill, ran unsuccessfully for Congress himself in his native Philadelphia at 28. In an age of cynicism about politics, Matthews can be romantic about the craft, defensive about its practitioners and personally affronted when someone derides Washington or “the game.” He can also be unsparing in his criticism of those who run afoul of his “take.” “I am not a cheerleader for politics per se,” Matthews says. “I am a cheerleader for the possibilities of politics.”

…Cable political coverage has changed, however, and so has the sensibility that viewers — particularly young ones — expect from it. Matthews’s bombast is radically at odds with the wry, antipolitical style fashioned by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert or the cutting and finely tuned cynicism of Matthews’s MSNBC co-worker Keith Olbermann. These hosts betray none of the reverence for politics or the rituals of Washington that Matthews does. On the contrary, they appeal to the eye-rolling tendencies of a cooler, highly educated urban cohort of the electorate that mostly dismisses an exuberant political animal like Matthews as annoyingly antiquated, like the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table whom the kids have learned to tune out.

His brand of “romance” about politics is out of date, and for good reason. Politics has changed in the last 30 years. Matthews made his bones when there were 28 lobbyists in Washington. There are now over 30,000. The game has changed. It’s the difference between Aaron Sorkin’s view of politics (The West Wing) and David Simon’s (The Wire).

In an interview with Salon, The Wire creator David Simon defends himself against the complaint that the fifth season of the show doesn’t address the role of the internet in the decline of newspapers:

If you’re saying that there needed to be scenes of the Internet interacting with journalism and bringing down journalism, I will now write you a scene: Interior, garden apartment anywhere. A white male, mid-30s, sits at a laptop computer in his underwear, linking to a Baltimore Sun story. He then scratches his left testicle until satisfied and continues to type commentary about that story onto his blog. Cut to drug corner, and on to the next scene.

The impact of the Internet is that it’s pulling the froth of commentary and debate off the top of first-generation news gathering, leaving newspapers with only a first-generation role for themselves, which is not enough for them to sustain readers, and so they’re losing young readers. By and large, excusing the fact that there are some first-generation journalists going out and acquiring new information directly for the Web, the vast majority of the Internet is reaction and debate and commentary — some of it brilliant. But I don’t run into a lot of Internet reporters at council meetings and in courthouses.

Earlier in the interview, Simon laments that the newspapers pissed away their chance to charge for content. I think that misses the point. Ad revenue already makes up 85% of a print newspaper’s budget. The 50 cents you pay for the paper itself is mostly symbolic.

But to his latter point, I think that’s spot on. There is an opportunity for more information gathering to be done by bloggers. I’ve tried to do that a bit with Orphan Road, but it’s hard when you have no money and have to work another job. I think there’s potential in that model, though. TPM has obviously made a go of that, and had great success.

A new generation of reporters is going to figure out how to combine (a) first-person reporting with (b) the emotional bond that bloggers have with their readers, and (c) make money through advertising or syndication or simply by going on salary with a traditional news organization, and have a really successful business on their hands.