I was on the road all last week, and I didn't live-blog a remarkable seminar in Los Angeles for two reasons. One: the usual annoyingly bad hotel wifi connection in the conference rooms. Two: I didn't want to invade the privacy of the participants. In the prep work, one of the editors quipped that he was reluctant to document his vision because these days his memo would immediately wind up on Romenesko. Sometimes we need to talk privately in order to work publicly.

I just wrote a note to an NAA mailing list on the topic of organizational structure that is a bit more radical than positions I've previously taken.

Like pretty much everybody who's spent a lot of time on the New Media side of the Great Divide, I've been leery of organizational integration. Why? Because Luddite values are deeply ingrained in traditional newspaper operational groups, and those values will lead us to defeat. Equally deeply ingrained: Utter denial that those Luddite characteristics exist. It's a dangerous combination.

Worth noting: The dopey DOPA legislation, which I previously described as a "war on social networking," is dying in a refreshed Congress.

Lines from the past occasionally float to the surface. Here's one I have been thinking about lately: "OK open systems beat great closed systems every time."

That one came from Scott Kurnit around 1994-95, when he was VP/marketing for Prodigy. His company, originally a joint venture of CBS, Sears and IBM, had built a closed system (great in its day) that was in the process of getting its tail kicked by a bunch of little startup companies that run by people who had no clear idea where they were going.

These startups were pushing open standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML.

Here's a New Year's resolution every news site should make: Throw the bums out! There is no reason to allow a small number of bullies to corrupt a community discussion forum. If your message boards, story comments, or blogspace has turned into the kind of place where decent people can't have a decent discussion, bring the hammer down ... on behalf of the rest of your users.

Yahoo News GM Neil Budde has shut down Yahoo's news message boards -- temporarily. In a note of explanation, he said:

I'm on vacation and really don't have time to clean up after the spammers who assault this site every night, so I'm disallowing anonymous comments for the time being.

Back in 1998 when I was at the Star Tribune, the Cowles family sold it to McClatchy for about $1.2 billion. McClatchy was a big surprise -- hardly anyone at the paper had heard of the company, and the sale price was a shocker.

I left the Star Tribune in 1999, and now McClatchy has sold the paper to a private investment group for $530 million, less than half that. I'd love to be able to point to myself as a factor (and maybe throw in a couple of others, such as Tim McGuire and Tom Mohr) but not even my kids will believe that line.