Now that the campaign against a free press is officially under way, perhaps it's time for a few words about a traditional American value.

I don't know how many years ago it was that I heard Greg Mitchell say he was on the verge of launching an Editor&Publisher blog. I do know that the setting was New Orleans in the pre-Katrina era.

Since then, E&P has continued to limp along, powered by a dismal excuse for a Web content management system administered by what appears to be an exceptionally inept IT department.

Sometime today, Google is due to release the first version of Chrome, which is being described as a Web browser. It's not that. It's transcendent. Chrome is a Web operating system.This should be no surprise. Since the earliest days of Netscape, the vision has been to make the Web the center of an applications universe, relegating the "desktop" to the dustbin.

Yesterday I asked, "Are obituaries obsolete?" My point was not that people don't want to read obituaries. My point was that in this era, we should be building life stories of major figures as online reference material, not waiting until they become death stories. So today we have a perfect example: Sarah Palin gets picked as John McCain's running mate.Sarah who? The Anchorage Daily News would seem to be a good place to look, but its coverage was slow out of the blocks.

Mindy McAdams relates how she watched the Democratic convention: On old-media television (noncommercial PBS), but with a laptop open and Twhirl (a Twitter client) running. My experience was slightly different: I watched almost all the convention online, with a window open to MSNBC's video stream.For reasons I don't understand (but do appreciate), MSNBC streamed the entire convention without commentary, without talking heads, without interruption. There was only one commercial -- a video preroll.

NPR has an audio report on the debate about whether the Columbia Missourian, the professional newspaper produced by the world's oldest journalism school, should go online-only, partner with the Columbia Tribune, or just buck up and continue to lose a million dollars a year to sustain the "Missouri Method" of print journalism training. I blogged about this issue two months ago, when I called J-school founder Walter Williams a "change agent" and said:

I've been using Scribefire for posting blog items, and for some reason it's confused about my GMT offset. I'm not really traveling into the future.