A post from Howard Owens reminds me that a lot of people probably don't know how easy it is to get circulation information about U.S. newspapers. For papers that are members of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, basic numbers and some deeper data is available online in a searchable format.

From Wired.com:

Romenesko quickly found himself living a lonely-guy existence. "I was basically stuck in my apartment," he says. “I would find myself at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, still in my bathrobe." This way of life grew from his hunch about the future of social interaction. "The first time I really sampled the internet, in 1989," he says, "I knew this would be a culture-changing force, and I wanted to be part of it."

If there's one idea that's stuck in my head after the Future of Journalism conference at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, it's the notion of elitism.

Elitism is high political insult these days, if you believe what you hear from the babbleonians on cable TV's "news" channels. Various anti-Obama forces are painting him as elitist. Personally I'd much rather have a smart self-made elitist as president than an American aristocrat who's as dumb as a bucket of hair. Does that make me an elitist? Is elitism such a bad thing?

Bob Cox has written a clear dissection of the AP vs. Cadenhead uproar that everyone should read carefully. It's not the case of Evil Giant versus the Blogosphere that some of the more hysterical responses have assumed. More like bumbling giant versus bumbling aggregator.