The problem with Tim Porter's blog is that he doesn't write often enough. That's probably because he's been busy finishing up his book, "News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change," written with Michele McLellan. I preordered my copy today (it's published April 1) and took note of his return to the keyboard with "The Real Heroes of Newspapers," in which he takes a shot at a couple of high-profile quitters.

Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its report, "The State of the News Media 2007," and I'd really like to read it before commenting on it. Unfortunately I didn't make it past the first page of the 38-page executive summary before stumbling over this sentence:

For some, the new brand is what Wall Street calls “hyper localism” (consider the end of foreign bureaus at the Boston Globe or the narrowing of the coverage area at the Atlanta Journal Constitution).

The last year has been a PR debacle for the newspaper industry, but some positive stories are trickling out. Last month Lisa Snedeker at Media Life wrote "Fact is, your average paper is just fine", pointing to the strengths of small-market newspapers.

It's been something like six months since the launch of the Times Reader, which I dissed as Microsoft's deja-vision of the future. Now Hearst, which owns the troubled Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has lined up with the dark side, announcing its own downloadable reader. Similar announcements have come from Forbes and London's Daily Mail.

One day I was doing some consulting and sat down with a new media director to talk about how he might work to make his website more complimentary and less directly competitive with his newspaper.

Develop the interactive community, I said.

But that takes time and people that I don't have, he said.

I'm in Paris at the conference "New Media: The Press Freedom Dimension," organized by the World Press Freedom Committee at UNESCO headquarters. It's been a humbling experience to be on stage with people talking about real barriers to Web publishing: government repression, censorship, arrests and outright poverty. And here I am discussing our interactive community efforts in a couple of cushy upscale suburban markets in the United States. Nevertheless, the audience seemed genuinely engaged and there was quite a line of people wanting to exchange cards and ask questions afterward.

Ted Stevens, the fossil who thinks the Internet is a series of tubes, has reintroduced legislation that died in the last Congress that would force schools and libraries to block social networking websites and chat rooms on the grounds that they're full of predators and (gasp) "cyberbullies," which apparently are more dangerous than the regular kind because they're cyber.