Attended the Washington News Council’s panel discussion at the downtown library Monday evening, entitled “Today’s News: A ‘Webolution’ in Progress.”

The six panelists came from different corners of journalism/commentary (Cory Bergman of KING-TV, Robert Hernandez of the Seattle Times, Josh Feit of the Stranger, Alex Johnson of MSNBC, Chuck Taylor of Crosscut, and Joan “McJoan” McCarter from Daily Kos). The moderator, Merrill Brown, used to work for MSNBC and was now with a Vancouver-based “citizen journalism” site, NowPublic.

But all seven of them are nowadays competing for the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of you, the online reader.

As one who’s seen this medium (or, as one panelist called it, a “distribution vehicle” that can carry umpteen different types of media) grow, I must confess I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know, and didn’t hear many arguments I hadn’t already heard. Buzzwords included: “Aggregation” (i.e., links to stories on other sites), “user generated content” (i.e., unpaid bloggers and videographers), “the end of the news cycle” (i.e., posting new content all the time), the supposed last days of print newspapers (someone suggested that some papers might not last another decade; I say we’re more likely to see some suburban and JOA papers fade out, but local monopoly papers in major markets would decline far more slowly).

The one real disagreement came when an audience member asked how these different organizations would reach out to under-40 readers. The Times guy mentioned recruiting teen volunteer bloggers from the Vera Project to cover rock shows at Bumbershoot. Crosscut’s Taylor, being the ever-dutiful David Brewster acolyte, scoffed at the very idea of needing anything to do with them pesky kids. The Stranger’s Feit gave the loveably cocky reply that his outfit already owns the advertiser-beloved young demographic; it’s built into everything they do. MSNBC.com’s Johnson had the best answer: He’s got a genuine 26-year-old single woman running the afternoon editor’s desk.

You’ll be able to view the whole thing on the state-owned cable channel TVW sometime in the coming weeks.

…and so does punditry: As of 9 p.m. PT tomorrow, the NY Times will stop hiding its op-ed columnists behind a paid-access firewall. The NYT’s commentator stable is the most prestigious in the biz, at least in this country. But there are too many great commentin’ guys n’ gals on the Inkernets who don’t, or can’t, do the pay-per-view deal (not that some of us would want to).

…may still tout the notion that our local real estate biz isn’t crashing at all, not really, at least not like some other places.

That rosy perspective hasn’t stopped Washington Mutual’s CEO from warning the national housing market could be heading for a “near-perfect storm.”

…is a longstanding advocate of inventive thinking and of progressive politics. It turns out that these two causes just might be more than coincidentally related. Some UCLA and NYU researchers now claim there are distinct “liberal” and “conservative” brain patterns.

If true, it would help explain why I, and most of my lefty friends, always fail to be persuaded by righty lines of argument, as seen in the op-eds, the talk radio, the Fixed Noise Channel, etc. Those screeds are meant to appeal viscerally to what conservative-bashing liberals call “the lizard brain,” via calls to fear, greed, and prejudice.

Still, I wouldn’t take this study as gospel truth. But then again, a healthy regard for skepticism’s a key component of the liberal brain…

…to remember when Lou Dobbs was a square-but-sane weekend news anchor on KING-TV, what with his recent string of silly anti-immigrant, anti-brown-skin, faux-populist tirades.

YouTube’s finally gonna have ads on its video pages. But they’ll only be on professionally-produced content by “partner” companies. The ol’ user-submitted videos apparently aren’t slick enough, or attract the right precision demographics, for sponsors to care about.

David Postman informs us that Seattle Times reports vocally cheered when Karl Rove’s resignation was announced on a newsroom TV.

Postman, defending traditional media “objectivity,” said they shouldn’t have done that.

Dan Savage replied that the departure of Bush’s favorite manipulative operative was something “worth cheering for.” Savage claims, “Maybe the reporters cheered because they, of all people, are in the best position to recognize Rove’s departure as a positive development for the nation—and for the ideal that all journalists everywhere honor the most: the truth.”

I’ve no problem with professional reports having minds, nor with them speaking their minds, even if it’s just amongst themselves.

As for the “Mayberry Machiavelli” himself, Rove was the dirty trickster who always got away with it, and now he’s away with getting away from DC. It’s not as if he had anything left to do for Bush, having played such a big hand in every ruination, disgrace, and failure of Worst-Preznit-Ever. Rove’s first love has always been the next election cycle, for which he’ll surely work as a string-puller for the GOP or one candidate. Expect the anti-Hillary mud to start slinging, and soon.

Austin cartoonist Ethan Persoff is posting complete issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s pioneering (founded 1958) magazine of committed satire and radical thought.

Krassner was one of the progenitors of hippie-era ribald masculine humor (despite having been born way back in 1932). Much of the Realist material has been anthologized in book form, but to really “get” it you need to see it in its Persoff-provided original context (32-page newsprint magazines with few pictures and no ads).

One just-posted 1961 issue contains the following unsigned one-liner within its back-page filler column: “Ever wonder if some of the pious souls who talk about exporting democracy really just want to get it the hell out of this country?”

…(or rather, a streaming-content company working with AT&T’s sponsorship) deliberately censor Eddie Vedder leading an anti-Bush chant during a live Lollapalooza webcast?

And in a related question, are there really still Lollapalooza concerts?

Yes to both questions.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake done by an overzealous “content monitor” employee at the content contractor.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT&T. (You’ll recall, won’t you, that today’s AT&T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the “Baby Bell” spinoffs of the original AT&T, which recently acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company’s online critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies’ warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called “throttled” broadband services (in which Internet service providers such as itself could speed up or slow down consumers’ connections to specific Web sites), and for cooperating too closely with MPAA/RIAA file-sharing crackdowns.

It’s not as if AT&T were censoring a site it wasn’t directly sponsoring.

It’s not as if you couldn’t get the deleted words from other sources. (Pearl Jam has put up the whole unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it’s not as if you can’t find anti-Bush messages online from many other sources.

Still, it ain’t good PR for a company trying to prove its trustworthiness (whilst basking in its share of the iPhone hype).

…this report, the Weekly World News is shutting down. Unlike most of my readers, I won’t miss it.

WWN, that most beloved of all periodicals by the would-be hipsters and the easily amused everywhere, began in 1980 as a spinoff of the National Enquirer. The Enquirer was morphing from its previous weird-news format into the highly successful celeb-gossip sheet it is now. The WWN was created to service fans of the material the Enquirer would no longer emphasize.

The rag found its market niche among all the kids who bought it to sneer at all the other people who supposedly bought it. By 1985, it was being written and edited by hip young adults for hip young adults, but still pretending to be targeted at the mouth-breathers out in flyover country.

It traded on its outrageousness. But that’s difficult to maintain. Every year the WWN became more over-the-top, more ridiculous. Its fake news evolved into a house of mirrors–they knew it was fake, you knew it was fake, they knew you knew, but they pretended they didn’t know you knew, and you pretended they didn’t know you knew.

It’s amazing they kept it up this long.

The beginning of WWN’s end may have come when it hired my ol’ acquaintance, cartoonist Peter Bagge, to create a weekly comic strip based on “Bat Boy,” a character whose airbrush-created face made the paper’s cover at least once a year. The pretense had ended with Bagge’s arrival. The editors had included true urban-hipster material.

American Media, current owners of the Enquirer and WWN, apparently turned down at least one offer to buy the publication, for reasons unknown.

…wants you to think of new Net-assisted video distro technology,not as another outlet for the big media corps., but as a means toward democratizing the medium.

…”reading is going to “go completely online.” I can imagine that fate for ephemeral and time-sensitive matter, for research and reference, and for community info sharing (aka “social networking”). But more artistic, entertainment-oriented, long-form, or “experience” reading (yeah, that includes porn) may always be more popular in nonvolatile formats that don’t require separate playback hardware, i.e. books.

…threatened by the current industry-wide newspaper fiscal crisis is the LA Times’s interminable Important Dammit National Feature Story, a genre apparently developed by the old LAT management to try and persuade NY/DC snobs that Angelenos could, indeed, read and write. (Time magazine infamously described the genre as “the newsprint equivalent of suburban sprawl.”)

Today’s example (free registration required, alas): A really, really long expose of the Gates Foundation’s investments in corporations that just may be hurting the very people, including third-world kids, the foundation’s promising to help.

(High up among the allegations: the charge that the foundation’s investments in big drug companies, with their high profit margins and their aggressive patent attorneys, contradicts its stated goal of eradicating AIDS in the developing world.)

…a student at the UW School of Communications, around the time some kids apparently broke into a 1957-vintage “time capsule” and snuck in some panties and porno mags. But no, I didn’t do it. I could guess who did, but it would only be speculation.

Somebody’s made a snarky/poignant collage music video to the Kingston Trio’s 1958 cold-war burlesque, “The Merry Minuet.” (Hard to believe, but the song was written by Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.)