Our project to relaunch Jacksonville.com on a new Drupal-based site management system has run into a slight delay that primarily involves integration with external, vendor-supplied systems. This is particularly frustrating because it pushes us into the Thanksgiving holiday, when nobody ever gets anything done. Instead of a public launch, we're going to slowly bring some selected external users on board over the next week or so. I'll post a link when I can.

I caught a bit of Thomas Friedman on the TV this morning, opining about what's wrong with General Motors and whether/how the government should respond. For those who haven't been following the story, the "heartbeat of America" is one thump away from bankruptcy and, as Mark Potts points out, worth less than half as much as the Washington Post Company.

One night last week I was having dinner in a Jacksonville, Fla., restaurant. At the table next to me, a Joe the Plumber clone was ranting about how terrible and biased the media had been during the campaign. And I'll confess I had an urge to whack his neatly shaved ditto head.

What's the matter with you? Has your brain gone soft? You have access today to the biggest and the broadest set of media choices in human history. You have it way better than you deserve, you knuckle-dragging skinhead. Kwitcherbitchin and enjoy it ... while it lasts.

We've pushed into mid-November the relaunch of Jacksonville.com on our new Drupal-based news site management system. We're not concerned about the technology, but we are concerned about the people. Radically changing production processes in the middle of the presidential election didn't seem to be a really bright idea.

Today's New York Times examines how Fox News and MSNBC seem to be covering two separate universes. How did we come to this? The answer turns out to be fairly simple: Do the math.

Economists have a common model that explains it all. Like all models, it's an oversimplification, but it's easy to follow. Instead of politics, let's think about ice cream stands and a beach.

Rube Yelvington died peacefully this morning in a Louisville hospital.

Rube was my dad. He also was a newspaper reporter, photographer, editor and publisher. At various times in his life he was a soldier, a delivery truck driver, a railroad man, a tour company operator, the proprietor of a country-western music hall, a mayor of a small town and a community organizer. I think he was a great man.

Packt, a publishing company that specializes in books about computer programming, has begun selling electronic versions of its books that you can download before the writing is even finished. They call the program RAW -- for "Read As we Write." You get to download chapters as they are posted, even before the final publication edits.