Speaking of redesigns ...

My favorite news site, MSNBC, launched its redesign this morning. It looks like nothing so much as a ... well, it looks like a newspaper.

That said, at very first glance, I think I like it. Very functional, uncluttered, and accessible. I'm a fan, so far.

A major victory for the First Amendment

In Arizona. And a reminder: If we don't protect the First Amendment, none of the others matter. The fuel that powers a democracy is the free press.

Eensy weensy tenny weeny yellow polka-dot bikini

Hey, Walden: Need some commentary on this story. My two cents: She's an idiot.

The times that try the media's souls

This guy asks whether bloggers should be protected by the First Amendment. He poses a question:

There's no specific definition of "press" in the 45 words of the First Amendment. So who might be bound by responsibilities that go along with the role of a free press? Are bloggers and other Web users part of a broadly defined "press" even though they certainly could not have been envisioned by the Colonial-era Founders who wrote the First Amendment?

Uh, wait a minute ... the Founders not only envisioned such a thing as bloggers; one of the Founders, Thomas Paine, essentially was one. His pamphlet, "Common Sense," laid the foundation for the Declaration of Independence. He was by no means a reporter or columnist in the traditional sense either then or now. If Paine was writing 210 years later, his stuff would probably appear at commonsense.blogspot.com (dude needs to give up that blog name, by the way; now, I want it.)

The Internet is a powerful and, alas, often-misused tool. Nobody's quite figured it out yet. This has been a big problem for established media, who had just figured out how to gain control of their own environments.

For better or worse, free, unfettered communication is the thing that will save America as we know it. No president, no Congress, no judge can subvert the will of an informed people. We have more information available with which to evaluate candidates and make decisions than ever before. We just have to learn how to use it.

And yes, it should be protected. The same law that protects purveyors of porn needs to protect purveyors of opinion, belief, and fact. Nothing less than the survival of the Republic depends on it.

The worst kind of news

Local TV weather guy John Winter died today. The sheriff's office is investigating his death as a suicide.

He had been with the station since 1994. He was 39. He lived in the next neighborhood over from us.

His co-workers were left behind to read the news to the public. It was difficult to watch. I can only imagine how much more difficult it must have been on the other side of the desk.

Thirty-nine. Same age as me. That's too damn young to be giving up.

Freefall

If the Dow was dropping as much as the value of human life appears to be dropping over the last few years (see: 9-11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Bailey, Colo., Nickel Mines, Pa., etc.), we'd be in sheer utter panic.

But since it's a bunch of soldiers, a couple hundred thousand Africans and a few children we don't know, well, it's just another news story.

What five years can do

Five years ago, I was one of the top news editors for the eighth largest newspaper in the United States. I was 33, and had been a professional journalist for more than a decade and a half. I had assembled sections for some of the biggest stories ever -- the first World Trade Center attack, the Branch Davidian siege, numerous World Series and Stanley Cups on impossible deadlines.

All ego aside, in whatever newsroom I was working, when something big broke, I was the go-to guy on the production side. I don't know much, but I will put my newspaper production and design and decision-making skills up against anyone anywhere in the world. I know how to put out a daily newspaper.

At 9:34 a.m. CDT on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was summoned to work early to put out the most important edition ever of the nation's eighth largest newspaper. I covered the 34.8 miles to work in 32 minutes, hitting my car's electronically governed 112 mph limit on the way.

As I pulled up to the building, with the newspaper's big Gothic nameplate on the side, it started to hit me. I pulled my car -- somewhat more slowly -- into a parking spot, near the news helicopter pad for our TV station. I got out. I closed the door. I began walking to the employee entrance, just like any other day.

Then I stopped.

A thought kept ringing in my head:

I don't know how to do this.

I stood there, on the top floor of that parking garage, for probably three minutes. Just stood there, the staircase down to the door in front of me, the car behind me. To my right was the skyline of the eighth largest city in the nation. A city that, for all I knew could have been the next target, being as it is a symbol of American consumption and oil power.

There I was, the Go-To Guy, just standing there. I don't know how to do this.

I took probably 100 deep, deep breaths. Somewhere around breath No. 45, I thought about going back to the car, back home to my family, and pretending it never happened. That thought went away before breath No. 46 came out. But I still stood there for another minute and a half. I don't know how to do this.

It was 10:01 a.m. My deadline for the extra edition we were publishing was 2 p.m. A quick review of a post from 2002 tells the story something like this:

I got out of the car and stood in the parking lot for a second, trying to get my pulse rate back down to normal. It hit me then that this was the Biggest Story Ever. I don't know how to do this, I thought. I don't have any idea. It was as if my brain had been wiped clean of everything I had learned over the past 16 years.

As soon as I was in the building, I was herded to a computer terminal and told I was designing the cover of our Extra edition. Deadline was 2 p.m. God only knew what more would happen between now and then. I didn't worry about it. I started designing, and fast, because everybody on the newspaper's masthead -- the publisher himself, the editor, the executive editor, the managing editor, and assorted others -- was standing behind me.

I hit the button on that page at 1:58, and turned my attention to the regular paper. The final page count was 48. I don't remember a lot of specifics from that exercise. We were just hunting and gathering and trying to determine what was true and what wasn't.

Back then I wrote, "I stood there for a second." I remember now it was much longer than that. Over and over in my head, I don't know how to do this.

I was responsible for the front page, back page and two inside pages of that Extra edition. I did the other pages fast enough to be able to spend time on the details of the cover. I remember fussing for several minutes over the spacing between the words "of" and "terror" in our main headline, "Day of terror." I switched the main photo five times, as a different photo editor brought me a new and better photo for the front page.

The front page I did that morning -- with the entire masthead of the nation's eighth largest paper standing behind me, watching every mouse click -- is now hanging in the Freedom Forum's Newseum. Everything on the page was spelled right. The words "of" and "terror" were properly spaced.

The main story was being written and revised right up to the point when I hit the button to send the page. It went out two minutes before deadline.

It was, in short, the culmination of everything I had learned and everything I had done in 16 years in journalism. I was handed a monumental task, and I delivered at a level that I never had before and never did again.

I worked more than 14 hours each of those first three days; then, one night, I broke down. Cried like a baby. I was able to ignore the full impact of what happened to our country, to a bunch of people whose only crime was not calling in sick on a beautiful Tuesday morning. But I could only ignore it for so long.

Dick Cheney tells us that the administration policies are working, and proof of that is that we haven't been attacked in five years. Excuse me, Dick, but we also weren't attacked in the 60 years before Sept. 11, 2001. Dumbass. The administration has accomplished nothing, and in many ways has made things worse. We've created chaos in a little country that had nothing to do with the attacks. We're stirring up shit in another. Meanwhile, the man with the money behind what happened is still out there, somewhere, with full ability to do it again if he wants to.

As for me? That was probably the beginning of the end of my journalism career. I damn sure never want to be part of another story that big, or that awful. The stories in the years afterward -- Afghanistan, Iraq, the threat from North Korea, day after day after day of human suffering and awfulness -- I just didn't want to know anymore. I still do know, of course, but on my own terms.

I'm not the go-to guy anymore. Journalism is a young man's game. I aged a lot those last few months of 2001. I just hope the young people who are taking it over learn to ask the right questions and don't accept everything that's being handed to them. It's more important that they know how to do it now than it was for me to know how to do it then.

The tide is turning

Newspapers really are dead.

Flight 93 tapes out

First gut response while the CNN babe is reading her transcription of the Flight 93 tapes released today in Alexandria, Va.:

Am I to believe that, under moment of great stress and trauma, that these hijackers would be sending their final prayers to Allah ... in English?

UPDATE: The New York Times notes that the hijackers were indeed speaking Arabic. Which still leads me to wonder how a presumably non-Arabic speaking CNN reporter would know just minutes after the tapes were released what was being said. No tinfoil-hat stuff here, just saying ...