Planet Abell

It's worse that Rush Limbaugh's feckless defenders in the political elite kiss him off not as a serious, fearsome political force, but rather a mere entertainer, not worth undue attention, to say nothing of condemnation. As dumb as Rush's political analysis might be, and as unpolitic his technique of expressing himself, his pool is politics, mostly invective against non-conservatives of his particular stripe (whatever that may be). Entertainers are supposed to, well, entertain. They are supposed to be, well, entertaining. This is, as they say, by definition. Rush isn't funny, except to the dittoheads he calls his fans, and these fans don't seem to realize how uncharacteristically accurate and demeaning that description from their spiritual leader is. Go to any comedy club, in any city, on any night and there will be at least one person about whom your table will look at each other and wonder, worlessly at first, in unison: How is this person not famous? An...

Does a politician on the campaign trail have any expectation of privacy? It's almost a silly question. But some pretty smart politicos have behaved as if there is more than one answer: Michael Steele is learning this, but unsuccessful Virginia Senatorial candidate George Allen and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown learned it the hard way. Now California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown seems to be shocked shocked that there's video recording going on here. Continue reading on wired.com's Epicenter blog

Reuters waded into the waters of opinion and analysis against a very strong tide: An iron-clad policy of doing nothing that could conceivably open the 150-year-old news agency to the charge it was not absolutely free from bias. In the not-yet three years since Reuters columnists began taking sides on stories Reuters reporters were covering, a breakthrough I called " Reuters Opinion 1.0 ," its global reporting power has only grown. But Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer seemed to complicate the question of institutional ambivalence with a post on his personal blog in which he inveighed against a "rush to judgment" concerning financial giant Goldman Sachs and a civil complaint by the SEC which accuses the Wall Street behemoth of fraud. Glocer states an obvious fact: Goldman is guilty of nothing until the company is found guilty of something, or agrees that it broke a rule or regulation. But now comes an object lesson into why this may not have been the best...

A disgruntled former employee is charged with hacking into the company's web-based remote immobilization to disable about 100 cars bought by customers who agreed to the leash because their credit rating would have made it impossible otherwise to get financing. The technology is an opt-in technique the company requires to insure the trust they have that credit-challenged buyers will make payments on time is not misplaced — as well the car the Repo Man will come looking for when they don't. But these Austin, Texas customers had done no wrong. It was a foolish payback prank that made a bad situation even worse for 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, now under arrest for "computer intrusion." But is this a Big Brother threat? Not so much. I talk it through with Celeste Headlee and John Hockenberry on 'The Takeway' (which, for this segment, should probably be called ' The Getaway .') Original reporting by Kevin Poulsen on Wired.com's Threat Level . At 3:30 a...

Deborah Howell, a pioneering journalist who served in the sadly shrinking ranks of newspaper ombuds during a three-year tenure at the Washington Post, died in a road accident while vacationing in New Zealand . Howell, 68, worked for both Minneapolis newspapers, ran one of them as it won two Pulitzer Prizes, and then became the Washington bureau chief for the Newhouse Newspaper Group and editor of Newhouse News Service — where her staff also won a Pulitzer. (Newshouse News is owned by Advance Publications, which is also the parent company of Condé Nast Digital, my employer). "I don't think I've ever met anyone with as much passion for news and as much creativity and as much of a feeling for what it takes to be a great editor," Steve Newhouse said in an interview with Minneapolis Public Radio . We never met, but I knew of Deborah Howell professionally; when she wrote an amusingly scathing piece about a WaPo opinion column which argued that women may actually be weaker a...

True confession: I don't really read magazines. Haven't for ages. Well, that isn't entirely true. I do read, or rather look, at magazines when they are hand-me-downs, or when there is a copy available for free at the office (that office being Condé Nast). But it has been ages since I subscribed to a periodical, and ages more since I bought one on the newsstand; my last clear memory of doing so was four years ago, well before even the possibility of working for wired.com was real, when I bought my daughter a copy of Wired . Something on the cover grabbed her. I was horrified that the single-copy price was nearly the same as a 12-copy subscription. I mentally hemmed-and-hawed (being out of work, and all) but I didn't want to stifle her interest, so we took a copy home. More recently I intercepted (*thanks, @MarketingVeep :) a list of magazine dreams my wife had intended to mail to Santa. And working through that list I realized that the traditional magazine fulfillment ...

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer publishes its last dead-tree edition Tuesday, the latest newspaper to succumb to the harsh realities of an internet economy where delivering bits is an increasingly inefficient way of delivering the news. News of the P-I's decision to publish online only was telegraphed for weeks , and it follows the decision of the Rocky Mountain News to shutter completely, the Christian Science Monitor to publish online only starting next month and deep concessions by staff at another Hearst newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, to keep that newspaper afloat. The owners put the newspaper up for sale on Jan. 9 and said they would shut it down if a buyer did not step forward. With a daily circulation of 117,000 the Seattle P-I is the largest daily to cease paper publication. The Christian Science Monitor is in 50k territory. "Tonight we'll be putting the paper to bed for the last time," editor and publisher Roger Oglesby told a silent newsroo...

There's going to be plenty of pushback on Alan Carr's NYT piece about how to save the newspaper , so I'll keep this short and sweet: Any industry which says it can only be saved by collusion is suspect on its face. Any decent journalist would scream bloody murder if that was suggested by, say, the financial services industry or the airlines or — closer to home — a Starbucks/Caribou cartel. The excellent examples of fee-based online services Carr cites cover niche topics, not geographical communities (except for The Arkansas Gazette, which gives away aggregator-length snippets). Odd argument, since these publications are doing exactly what newspapers aren't doing, by organizing around subjects rather than territory and not making me subsidize sports coverage I don't want. (Carr left out the Financial Times , which charges more than any of his examples and has an even more narrowly-defined clientelle.) Google doesn't need you. Repeat: Google doesn't need y...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy I talk about webcams with an easily-amused David Shuster.

My recent appearance on GMA . No sightings of Regis, Kelly or any of the "The View" girls.

The Pulitzer Board has decided to open up qualifying publications to include some web sites , which is a step in the right direction. But it continues to exclude magazines, broadcasters and their respective websites -- which seems painfully quaint. The Pulitzer Prizes are meant to celebrate journalism — well, U.S. journalism, but that’s another story. When they were created newspapers were arguably the best gene pool of quality journalism. They were also a major source of slipshod, opinionated, careless writing — which does nothing to explain the Pulitzer Board's current Two Internets policy. The term "Yellow Journalism" was coined during Joseph Pulitzer's New York City newspaper war with William Randolf Hearst, for heaven's sake, an era which saw tabloidy excess that would make today's least conscientious blogger shudder. But — and it seems almost ludicrous to argue what seems so obvious — newspapers are no longer the exclusive or even main conduit for qualit...

I was on a panel the other day, subject of "The Future of Journalism" (yeah, I know, that narrows it down to about 72 panel discussions in New York City this week alone) and the conversation drifted as it almost certainly did at the other 71 to why there will always be a demand for magazines, books and even newspapers, when all are available digitally. Read the entire Epicenter Blog post here .

Y eah, I love this debate. I wrote at the Committee of Concerned Journalists on the naughty word controversy ( What the $%*&#! Did He Say ) and how newspapers perpetuate a silly standard of keeping foul language off their pages even if the foul language is the story (btw,the clip doesn't make clear what prompted Sam Zell to curse; it was the reporter who asked the question walking off before he had finished talking). But the merit of the question is fundamental. And I don't think there is an easy answer. Unlike, say, the Big Three automakers it is too easy to blame newspaper executives for failed strategies that have left their businesses struggling; while Detroit is similarly saddled with legacy issues that new players were fortunate to be able to avoid, it is also true that US carmakers missed and dissed trends that invited nimble competitors to flourish. But people still buy cars, so at least the automakers don’t have to start making bicycles, gyrocopters -- or frozen pi...

J eff Jarvis asks a provocative question (imagine the odds): What will the "distributed university look like?" Start here: Why should my son or daughter have to pick a single college and with it only the teachers and courses offered there? Online, they should be able to take most any course anywhere. Indeed, schools from MIT to Stanford are now offering their curricula the internet. Similarly, why should a professor pick just from the students accepted at his or her school? Online, the best can pick from the best, cutting out the middleman of university admissions. Looking way out into the future (but, hey, Sam Zell is saying that nupes will be OK — in 30 years! ), I wonder if we are rubbing up against forces that will expose the limitations of the free market as it relates to supply. If aggregators become the dominant publishers but do not participate in news gathering, what happens to reporting? If it is a practical truth that any movie or book can be obtained easily and...

The Fed cut, as reported this morning (emphasis added): NEW YORK ( Reuters ) - Stocks headed for a slide at the open on Tuesday as fear of a recession gripped investors, prompting the Federal Reserve to slash benchmark U.S. interest rates by 75 basis points in a surprise intermeeting decision . NEW YORK ( AP ) - ... The Fed's move was unsurprising , given that world stock markets were falling precipitously the past two days, and that U.S. stocks had tumbled last week amid growing fears of a recession in the United States.

D on Imus is back on the air. Has it been six months already? Did I miss the national conversation about race while I was out at Starbucks? As a very smart friend told me during that frenzied week that saw Imus outed, ousted and banished, this was "Bonfires of the Vanities II." Sadly, sequels are almost never better than the original. But if George Steinbrenner got back to running the Yankees a couple of years after being banned for life , I guess Imus doing morning drive time before Spring's leaves even change color is nothing. Imus's trajectory is immaterial to me . I wasn't a fan so I wasn't sad to see him go. But I did hope that this time, at least, something would somehow justify yet another pagan dance around the bonfire. Instead, Imus looks wronged and he's been paid off for his trouble. What a Difference 150 Days Make "Imus in the Morning" and the MSNBC simulcast was canceled in April after Imus referred to the mostly black Rutgers ...

T he New York Times' decision to stop charging for content that had been behind the "TimesSelect" firewall is good news for fans of Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and 21 of their columnist colleagues. And it is more compelling evidence that charging the customer directly for online content is not a winning strategy. TimesSelect was generating about $10 million a year, the newspaper reports, “But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com . Even television, the epitome of an ad-supported medium, found ways to charge for some content, even things that had once been free. But TV spread like kudzu only because it was all free all the time Couple that with the announcement yesterday that AOL was moving its senior managers from Dulles, VA to New York to be closer to the ad industry -- to say nothing of its new strategy of te...

T here has been a fair amount of discussion about Google's new news experiment by which they will publish comments on stories they aggregate from "those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question." The chatter has mostly been about Google's criteria: whether it is undermining journalism and/or giving a PR gift to disgruntled subjects. But I haven't seen any discussion of what I'd say is the fundamental issue: Does Google know what it is getting into? I agree with those who say that in not going far enough with the initiative -- open it up to everyone -- Google is choosing to empower a class that is already empowered, and which journalism exists to check. But why curtail comments and create a clunky infrastructure for authenticating "legitimate" comments that only seems to invite charges of favoritism? Does Google really want to take a position on publishing or not publishing pushback from entities which have not...

T he New York Times, starting with today's edition, has slashed 1-1/2 inches from the width of the paper "to the national newspaper 12-inch standard," it says on a front-page box. The move save on newsprint and "in some printing press locations, makes special configurations unnecessary." The paper has retained a six-col layout and the cramped feeling of narrower columns is felt immediately; it seems as though their width is about the same as when the paper was 8-col. Fewer Letters Fit To Print The change appears most dramatic on the editorial page: editorials are the same width, which means that letters to the editor have lost an entire column. A special explanation is made here: "As you can plainly see, the available space for letters has been reduced by about one-third. There's no question that the smaller paper is easier to wield, though I suspect that the ancient technique of folding opened pages in half and reading it in quarters -- the better to t...

R emember the name Mark LaCroix. Lacroix, a guy who lives in Minneapolis, carried CNN and blew away local coverage for the first crucial 20 minutes of today's collapsed bridge story , proving compelling, articulate live accounts after sending about five pictures of the destroyed span -- about what a pro's first dump would be. He even had the presence of mind to send CNN a filer, only a week old, of the intact bridge. CNN's producers didn't think to immediately make use of that image until LaCroix mentioned it in passing to a surprised Wolf Blitzer, who asked on the air that it be broadcast immediately. Because of LaCroix, CNN's coverage was superior to that of their local affiliate, whose on-air anchors were reduced to time-killing babble over the ambiguous video of a fixed-position (likely security) camera somewhere off in the distance, which did not even cleraly show the collapse as well as it did a nearby intact span. LaCroix's work is on the CNN online story...