Continuing my riff on the four keys to a great news website:

I stumbled across a great quote from the late Douglas Adams, who noted that we think everything invented before we were born is normal, everything invented before we were 30 is exciting, and everything invented after that is an offense against the natural order of things.

Kevin Anderson hits the nail squarely:

Ben Compaine cites a National Science Foundation-funded study showing that it's the marketplace, not the ownership, that drives "slant" in news media. This makes perfect sense in a Darwinian way. Iconoclasts and polemicists may have their audiences, but you can't drift too far from the consensus and still maintain a big audience. So writers write and editors edit to the expectations of the community.

UK's Press Gazette (trade journal for newspapers) has churned up a list of "The New Media Establishment - 50 people shaping online journalism."

In the comments, this anonymous flame:

More fuel on the fire: Writing for the Nation, Eric Alterman asks if it's "time to abolish the editorial page."

I'm sorry to see Dean Baquet lose his job as editor of the Los Angeles Times. I take no joy in the wholesale restructuring of the newspaper business that I see unfolding before us. But it's real, it's necessary and it's driven by economic and technological change beyond our control.

An overeager antispam filter appears to have eaten all my comments data. I've restored from a recent backup, but a couple of notes are missing (from Jay Small and Howard Owens, if I remember correctly.)

While I was at it, I upgraded to the new Drupal 5 codebase. It's beta 1, so there may be some surprises.