Now who will tell us the way it is?

One of my earliest memories is of sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a black-and-white console TV watching Walter Cronkite's coverage of one of the Apollo moon missions. I was too young to understand the complexity of the science in sending men to the moon, but I knew that this was a big deal. There was something about Cronkite's coverage of the event that told even a young boy that this was a big deal.

My parents still have the console TV I watched the broadcast on. It hasn't functioned as a TV or a radio or a record player in decades. Now it's mostly a long, extremely heavy side table along a wall in my parents living room. But, sadly, Walter Cronkite is now gone.

For much of my youth, the three major networks were all the TV we had, but when it came time for the evening news, like many American families, there was only one channel to watch -- Walter Cronkite on CBS.

Cronkite retired before I pursued my education and a career in journalism. As a print journalist, I don't know that I consciously considered Cronkite an influence, but I know he was a huge influence on my early knowledge and understanding of the world. TV news and journalism have changed a lot since Cronkite retired from the daily media stage in 1981.

I learned about Cronkite's death, not from the evening news, but from the Internet, specifically Twitter, and then read the story on the Wall Street Journal website.

I'll be curious to see how the media world covers Cronkite and his passing. We've been bombarded with all the minutia surrounding Michael Jackson's death for more than three weeks now. By all rights, coverage of Cronkite's death should eclipse coverage of Jackson's death based on the role Cronkite played in generation's of lives. But I know it won't. By Monday morning the media world will largely have moved on to other things, including more trivia about Jackson's life and death. It's a different world than it was in Cronkite's heyday.

At my current job, I have been consumed for more than a week with preparing for the launch of a new website. It's an exciting time and an exciting world. I love the conveniences of modern technology and the speed with which information can be shared with the world. But part of me missed the time when the world was as black and white as that old television set and we could tell the most important issues of the day affecting the world by where they ranked in Cronkite's broadcast and how much time the segment commanded.

So long Walter, and thanks for keeping the issues of the day in perspective.

GM and Bing saturate the airwaves

Either I watch too much TV or GM and Microsoft are spending some serious money on their new TV campaigns.

In the case of General Motors, about every other commercial break seems to feature GM's "Chapter 1" commercial, putting a positive spin on the company's bankruptcy filing.

As a print/online journalist, I hope they funnel some money to newspapers and their websites too. But the cynic in me wonders how long it will be before some politician throws a hissy fix and complains about how much money the company is spending on advertising now that taxpayers own most of the company after the latest bailout. So I expect the ads to be pulled in short order. But media companies can sure use the money, especially as so many of those local dealers, which aren't selling many cars for either GM and Chrysler and thousands of them are about to get their signage pulled. Many of them may not be around when American car buyers return to the showrooms.

Come to think of it, with FCC control of the airwaves and government ownership of GM, maybe their new commercial actually qualify as a donated airtime PSA.

The other commercial assaulting the airwaves right now is the one for Microsoft's new search engine, Bing.com.

Will Microsoft's new search engine pose a threat to the Google colossus? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, have you Binged yourself?

I did. So far I like it. But maybe that's because on Google, there is a millionaire with the same name as me who shows up first on the search. My work blog profile comes up second. I come up No. 2 on Bing too, but the No. 3 item is also a reference to me. The millionaire dude doesn't show up until No. 5.

I have to like a search engine where I outrang someone on the Forbes 400.

But in the interest of full disclose there is an obvious flaw to Bing. The No. 1 person on the search is a reference to a neurologist named Gary L. Miller. WTF? I searched for Gary L. West.

So keep working on it Microsoft. But I have already found something to like there. But I do have a question, does Matthew Perry get a residual for the use of his "Friends" character's last name? I sawy his recent appearance on Kevin Pollak's Chat Show. Perry seemed like he might be looking for work. At least hire the guy for a frickin' commercial.

And thanks GM and Microsoft for eating up some of those commercial spots that probably would have been filled by Viagra and Cialis ads.

Read and watch news with a critical eye

I am proud to be a journalist. I am also pleased, in this difficult journalistic climate, to still be a full-time employed journalist. But sometimes people need to realize that the things that get reported as big news isn't necessarily important news.

This current swine flu static is a good example. What's largely missing from this story is context. People obviously care about this story. It's resonating with the public. But should people care? Probably not, at least not as much as they the media and general public seems to right now.

As of this writing, Mexican health officials say there have been 159 deaths and 2,498 illnesses so far in that country. Mexico has a population of just under 110 million people. That means that 0.0024 percent of the population afflicted, sick or killed by swine flu in Mexico.

My dad told me something once that put some of what I -- and my media brethren -- do into context. My dad is a pilot. One time he had a problem with the landing gear on a plane he was flying. I don't remember all the details, but I think the nose wheel on the plane didn't come down. So he made an emergency landing at the Hillsboro, Ore., airport. To him it was no big deal, other than it caused some minor, but expensive, damage to the plane.

A TV crew showed up at the airport to cover the "story." He didn't see what made that a story at all. No one was injured. As he put it, it was the aviation equivalent of a non-injury traffic accident. A fender-bender really.

TV stations and newspapers don't show up for non-injury fender-bender accidents. They pay no notice really, unless of course it ties up a freeway during rush out. In that case the collision isn't the story, the story is that large numbers of people are stuck in traffic.

Fifty-five people have died this season of the plain-old flu in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and more than 24,000 have gotten sick from one of the non-swine flu strains. The CDC also estimates that each and every year 36,000 people in the U.S. die from some sort of flu related cause.

Where are the screaming front page headlines over that one? Why don't the stock or commodity markets react to that?

Why? Because it's normal. It's ordinary. News isn't always just what's big or what's important. A critical component of news is often just what's new or different. The old journalism saying is that when a dog bites a man, that's not news, but when a man bites a dog, that's news. Why, because it's unusual.

People are getting sick from something called swine flu. That's new and different. Of course people are getting sick and dying from regular ol' flu too. But that's normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill life and death.

It's sort of like reality TV. Just because everyone is talking about it doesn't mean it's important. It's a distraction for a while from the economic recession, high unemployment and layoffs.

So buckle your seatbelt tight. You are at more risk driving your own car than riding in a plane or from swine flu. There's far more important stuff to worry about. The Blazers have to go back to Houston and play the Rockets on their home floor, after all.

Dreaming of sunshine, blue waters and blogging bliss

I've made a big decision. I've decided to quit my job. I'm moving to Phoenix and becoming a pool boy and professional blogger.

April Fools'!

OK, so I know I probably didn't fool anyone. Anyone who knows me would know I'd never do any job that requires manual labor, even if it is only fetching towels, and I don't blog often enough to be a full-time blogger.

I've never been any good any good at coming up with clever April Fools' jokes. It's not one of my talents. I think part of the problem is that I can't sell the joke because I'm a terrible liar.

Don't get me wrong, I couldn't qualify for sainthood. It's not that I don't fib, or stretch the truth or tell a whopper from time to time. But, I'm must not good at looking someone in the eye when I do it. The lie is painted all over my face.

That's not a good trait for pulling off the gag.

So any and all attempts at pulling an April Fools' joke always had to be quick, before my face cracked or my transparent acting skills were exposed.

One thing I've never figured out though is the tradition of an April Fools' edition for a new publication. I admire the talent, like this piece from The Guardian, but if you are a news outlet, do you really want to be good at publishing a piece of fiction in your publication and "fooling" people?

I hope you have a great April Fools' day and don't get fooled too much, or by anyone with a sense of humor that is too cruel. It's always much better to be the fooler than the fool.

Emerald staff on strike?

Are you following the dust up at the Oregon Daily Emerald? If not, you might want to check out this story about the Emerald news staff going on strike.

I won't try to tell the story here. It's bizarre beyond words, but apparently the students objected to a job offer to Steven A. Smith, thinking bringing him on board would someone threaten the editorial independence of the student journalists. Yes, that's the same Steve Smith who has been editor of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., and Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo. Smith shares his side of the story on his blog.

Forgive, me, but I find the whole thing funny, but sad. Where is the reality of the working world in this whole scenario? Journalists at a financially troubled paper choosing to go on strike? Now?

Makes me glad I am a journalist trained at Oregon State University and gained some practical experience at the Daily Barometer, although the journalism program (part of the College of Liberal Art, not a Journalism school). But the reality is, what I learned in school only got me that first newspaper job and a lot of training has happened since.

One of the things I learned outside the student environment was a point perhaps too subtle in understanding the First Amendment when I was young and more principled than experienced. The thing about freedom of the press is that freedom belongs to the people who own the press, not the people the owners hire to run the presses or cover the news.

This would all perhaps be a lot more amusing if my daughter wasn't thinking that she may want to go to the University of Oregon and study, God forbid, journalism.

On, and all you purists out there lamenting the rise of social media, guess what? I learned about the strike on Twitter.

A video obituary of the Rocky Mountain News

This takes a while to load and it's long, but it's a moving tribute to the Rocky Mountain News of Denver by the folks there who are now out of work.

It's a scenario likely to play out in newsrooms, newspapers and cities around the country this year.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Bloggers, be careful what you wish for

I don't think I've ever read an article in Salem Monthly before this week, but there was a copy of it sitting in the lunch room at work and the cover story caught my attention.

In typical tabloid style, the teaser on the cover was different than the headline of the article. The headline of the piece, by Kevin Hanson, is "Defining media: A question of credibility." I think the cover teaser posed the question of whether bloggers were journalists (I don't have the print copy to check).

I thought the piece was interesting. I have my own take, of course.

Most bloggers are definitely not journalists. They are more like columnists, or more precisely people who write letters to the editor, but also own their own presses. Bloggers, mostly, spout opinions, like those blowhards on cable news stations that don't actually cover the news, they just bitch about, well, seemingly everything.

And there's nothing wrong with spouting opinions.

Bloggers have a point of view and express it, something journalists in the traditional media try very hard not to do in their coverage of stories. Journalists (with the exception of opinion writers and columnist) spend most of their working time reporting other people's opinions rather than sharing their own (and opinion writers actually share the opinions of either their editor board or their publisher, which may not be their personal opinion). The job of the journalist is to cover an issue as objectively as possible, to give both sides of the issue (or as many sides as are practical given time and space constraints). Journalists attempt to be fair and balanced. Bloggers have no such limitation.

But let's be honest here. Not all journalists, or all media, are created equal. Not all have the same level of skill or training or experience. This is largely a function of staff size. Papers with small staffs often do not have the luxury of having specialists or people who can spend an entire day, let alone several days (or weeks or months) working on one story. In my earlier life, as an editor in charge of local news reporting staff's at a couple of different newspapers where I worked, I used to have a saying. That saying was repeated often to let the reporters I supervised to remind them of what was expected of them.

"Two stories a day keeps the editor at bay."

I even made up an 8-by-10 sign that hung on my desk to remind reporters of the slogan even when I wasn't at my desk or speaking the words.

Given the number of reporters we had and the general amount of space we had for local news, we needed an average of two stories a day. The New York Times may boast that it's pages contain "All the news that's fit to print," but many papers print whatever news fits. Sometimes the stories have to be whittled down to fit the space, and sometimes you have to make sure you have enough stories to fit the space that will be available.

When a reporter writes two stories a day, those stories are not going to be in-depth investigative pieces. You do what you can, talk to who you can reach quickly and you write quickly.

At the bigger (and better) of the papers where I used that mantra, having most of the reporters meeting that "quota" meant that we could afford to have a reporter every week concentrating on an in-depth story, and we could have a reporter or two a day focused on the biggest story, or stories, of the day for our front page or local section cover. A story could fall through and we wouldn't have to scramble. It gave us flexibility.

Bigger news organizations have more flexibility. They can hold a story if it isn't good enough. If it doesn't pass muster. More people get a chance to read a story it before it makes it to print. Check for typos. Ask questions if things aren't clear or don't make sense. There is someone to ask/deman someone make one more phone call, get one more source, check one more fact.

That doesn't mean a one-person blog or website can't employ journalistic principals. Heck, there are still a few newspapers in small communities out there that have newsrooms that size, or are not much larger.

In the Salem Monthly/WillametteLive.com article, it uses as example of a blogger who wanted to cover a closed session by a government body as the crux of defining just who, or what, a journalist is in Oregon. It's ironic, even comical. I won't comment on whether Mark Buntner, aka Torrid Joe, of loadedorygun.net is a journalist. He's the reporter mentioned in the article, if you didn't follow the link. But I do know that government agencies like the Lake Oswego City Council cannot and should not define what a journalist is or a legitimate news media outlet is.

Journalism is not the government, nor is it is licensed or sanctioned by the government. Oregon has some great open meetings and public records laws, which allows representatives of the news media to attend most types of executive sessions, however discussions in those meetings are not supposed to be reported. A media representative is there, ostensibly, to make sure the members of the government body doesn't do something they are not supposed to do in one of those meeting, like take a vote or discuss a topic other than what they said they were going to discuss in closed session. But one thing I learned as a journalist working for more than 10 years in California, where the laws are not so favorable to the media or the public, it is possible to report the news without having access to closed-door sessions. It makes the job harder, but not impossible. I wished I could have taken Oregon's laws to California with me, but I worked with some damn fine journalists in California who kept government bodies accountable to the public quite well, in spite of laws that made it damn hard for journalist to get some information or prove laws were broken (or at least bent) by government agencies behind closed doors.

If Buntner/Torrid Joe, or any other blogger wants to behave like a "mainstream" media member -- want to be considered a journalist (or citizen journalist) -- and have the opportunity to attend executive sessions, I have one simple suggestion.

If you want to be treated like the news media, then act like the news media. Oregon Revised Statute 192.640 says:

Public notice required; special notice for executive sessions, special or emergency meetings. The governing body of a public body shall provide for and give public notice, reasonably calculated to give actual notice to interested persons including news media which have requested notice, of the time and place for holding regular meetings.

If a blogger/website operator regularly attends a government board's meetings and requests notification of all meetings -- and if the government body complies and includes the blogger(s) on their notification list -- it will be a lot harder later for the government body to say you aren't part of the news media. If you work like the media and are treated like the media, you are the media.

I don't know if Buntner/Torrid Joe did that or not. But if a blogger uses his or her forum to let the public know when government meetings will be held so the people can participate in the public debate too, in council chambers where the actual votes are cast, that's what the media do. If the blogger provides some measure of coverage of issues out of those meetings regularly, that is part of the role journalists play. It's not the sexy part, or the glamorous part, and it is rarely a fun part. Go figure, it's a job. It's work.

Like it or not, along with the First Amendment rights many bloggers so wish to enjoy, there would/will also come some news media responsibilities.

Oh, and one more thing. There may be such a thing as a professional journalist (as in someone who gets paid to report the news), but journalism is not a profession, in the classic definition. It doesn't pay well enough for one thing. But more importantly, journalists are not licensed and journalism does not require a doctoral degree. So for those bloggers that aspire to be considered journalists, you can become one. But if you just want to spout off about your passion for your pet or your personal politics or your shitty day, go for it. People may find that stuff more interesting anyway.

Hell, I'd much rather be a professional blogger -- that is unless blogging becomes a profession. I don't want to have to take a test and get a license.

Group tries to put out fire heating calls for Sam Adams to resign

I hate acronyms. It seems there's an acronym for everything. But I heard about a group today that is just begging to be known by an acronym.

The realization came to me while watching the 11 o'clock news on KATU, the ABC affiliate in Portland. They were leading the newscast with the latest story on the scandal surrounding Portland Mayor Sam Adams.

The story prominently featured Hollie Teal, a supporter of Adams, who believes he should stay in office in spite of his admission that he lied about a sexual relationship he had with a young male a few years ago.

Hollie is working to rally support for Adams. She's started a blog, Sam is Still My Mayor, and a group on Facebook that already has 130 members.

In Teal's interview with KATU she gave the group of supporters an unofficial name. "We are the People in Support of Sam," Teal said. Seems an appropriate name to me. People in Support of Sam -- P.I.S.S. -- because Adams has undoubtedly pissed all over his political career.

I'm fascinated by the Adams scandal story, but the things I want to know aren't the things that are making the evening news, the morning papers or the media websites. I want to know the story behind the story. Rumors of Adams' involvement with the other man in this story were apparently circulating years ago, before Adams officially began his run for mayor. But I want to know what pushed it to the forefront now, after Adams was seated as mayor. I want to know what the conversations were like in the Oregonian newsroom, where Adams' partner works as an investigative reporter.

Sure, I'll check in periodically to follow developments in the story. My daughter lives in Portland, so how the city is run, and who runs it, are of obvious interest. But what I'm really interested in is finding links to the story behind the story of how this broke and the intrigue of how journalists and politicians are intermingled here, like the former Portland Mercury reporter who had been trying to track down the sex rumor and ended up on Adams staff.

Media organizations are good at aggressively pursuing a big, breaking news story and political scandal revealed (in this case, finally, as I understand it, by Willamette Week, to home Adams first confessed his lie). But I am particularly interesting in the story behind the story and how the story made its way to publication/broadcast/posting. Now some of those details are coming to light, like Willamette Week's story on why Adams confessed. I also find it fascinating when media report on the actions of other media. It is, surely, one of the benefits of having a competitive media environment with watchdogs keeping and eye on the actions of government, elected leaders and public servants.

So many media outlet are in financial trouble now, along with the economy, and journalists are among those frequently joining the ranks of the unemployed. One has to wonder how many competitive media market, or how competitive those markets will be, after all the economic dust settles.

This story is fascinating on so many levels. Yep, it's a real P.I.S.S.er.

They say we only hurt the ones we love

I guess I should be thankful I am not currently working in the mainstream media.

The news has been grim all year, and there is no sign of it ending anytime soon. Like so many industries, people are losing jobs and workplaces are being retooled in order to remain profitable or return to profitability.

Last week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was put up for sale with employees being told if it is not sold the paper may convert to online-only publication, or stop publishing altogether. This week my former employer, Gannett, announced that all non-union employees at their publication will be required to take a week off without pay in the first quarter of this year. This after enduring another round of layoffs at papers last quarter

I am so sad for my friends facing the hardships of losing jobs, losing pay. I am also trying to come to grips with realizing that I may never work in a mainstream newspaper newsroom again, due to jobs being lost and newspapers turning to a workforce shorter on experience that will cost less.

I love newspapers. I love the thrill of covering the news and providing information to the masses. I am a news junky. I love to know what's going on in my community, my former communities, my state, my country and to a lesser extent the world.

But I have a confession.

I do not subscribe to a newspaper. Not anymore.

I am a little ashamed to admit that on a public blog, but it's true.

There is no one single reason I don't subscribe. Perhaps not even a big reason. But the reasons add up to the point where it was easy to cancel my subscription to the local paper last year.

First off, I get my news from multiple sources throughout the day. I have a morning news program as I get ready for work. I listen to a news/talk radio station as I am shaving and showering and on my drive to work. I read a wire service at work, monitoring developments not only for the niche publication I work for, but also for other stories that are of interest to me. I also get bombarded with news releases from various government agencies, companies and organizations at work all day long. I visit multiple websites that feature or have news content on them. We also get a variety of general news and industry publications at work.

That's a lot of news. Too much really.

But I like the instantaneous nature of media today. I like watching events live on TV or online if they are important to me, personally or professionally. I like being able to choose from multiple sources of information when news breaks, like you can online.

It's not the same as stumbling across that story in a newspaper or magazine that catches your eye with its headline, or photographs, graphics or illustrations. It's fun to read stories that I surprise myself in finding I was interested in the topic. I like leaving though the pages to see what treasures are there.

But those treasures seemed to be becoming fewer and farther between. Mostly I found myself reading my local paper or the Oregonian and seeing a headline, or a story, and saying to myself, "I already knew about that. That's old news." It was easy to turn the page and I was left feeling empty. Disappointed.

I also try to be a responsible person and recycle my newspaper. But living in an apartment, I don't have curbside recycling. So gathering up the papers to be recycled was a pain. I still have a box of papers here that I need to take to the recycling drop-off site (along with several phone books, which I have no use for whatsoever, except at work, where they serve as a base for my computer monitor to bring it to eye level). Yep, there's still a box of newspapers to recycle, and like I said, I canceled my subscription last year, in June, judging by the papers at the top of the stack.

The subscription price just wasn't worth it. I don't want or need coupons. Canceling made sense to me. One less bill in the mail. One less payment to made.

The fact of the matter is, I don't really miss it. I pick up a paper now and again out of the rack. But both the Oregonian and Statesman Journal charge 75 cents for weekday papers now. Not a huge sum to be sure, but it seems a waste when I pay it and find only "old" news and then have to recycle the paper too.

I want to be a newspaper reader. I want to have the option of working at a newspaper again. But the fact of the matter is that newspaper companies are gutting their newspaper to remain profitable. They know they are losing readers, and advertisers to online, but still must maintain complex, slow production methods necessary to producing a print product (where the money still is for now) and can't fully focus on a web product and making that profitable.

My own industry and publication are certainly not immune to the economic effects or the trends spreading through the mainstream press like cancer. Our day of reckoning may be coming too, and perhaps it will be closer than we may know.

I realize I am one of the people holding a gun to the head of my own industry. Because my reading habits have changed, because I demand more information faster like so many in my generation and most people in the generations behind mind, there are new fewer people covering news in depth and with experience to do so in as objective a manner as is humanly possible (or probable). Oh, sure there are more bloggers sharing their own experiences and expertise in ways the traditional media never did. In many cases its more interesting, more focused and even more in-depth. But it's rarely balanced. Maybe the balance comes from reading so many perspectives, not getting multiple perspectives in one place. I do miss having a place to turn where people have compiled the news and event in one place that are deemed the most important for a community to know. Maybe that's the price we pay for having quick access to the news.

I do love the news. I love newspapers. I'm not sure if my first love abandoned me or I abandoned it. I dream of reconciling, but our differences may be irreconcilable. It's killing me. And killing newspapers too.

Media professionals lose while their companies win in a bad economy

The more you study the more you know,
The more you know the more you forget.
The more you forget, the less you know,
so why study?

The more I learn about business and Wall Street and investing, the less I seem to understand. I was listening to a radio talk show this evening on which an economist from the University of Oregon said we are not only in a recession, we are in an economic depression.

You see businesses all over laying people off and some business closing. More people are out of work. This week, more than 1,700 people are losing their jobs from one newspaper company -- Gannett. The layoffs are not done there and the final tally is not yet known. But it will get higher.

To a casual observer, it might make sense because fewer people are out there spending money on stuff, including advertising and newspaper subscriptions. And everyone has probably seen headlines on newspapers or websites of how much advertising has been pulled out of newspapers and other traditional media and was being directed to websites, even before the economic collapse became daily front page news. So it would be easy to assume that publicly owned newspaper companies, like Gannett, are losing money. Right?

Well, they aren't. These companies are still making money, and lots of it. They just aren't making as high of profit margins as they used to make. In order to maintain the margins that Wall Street seems to expect in an economy where real estate advertising and classified advertising have dwindled, costs are being slashed. The biggest costs in the newspaper business are newsprint and people. So, you see the physical sizes of pages getting smaller, the number of pages in papers getting fewer and the number of people on the payroll being slashed in order to maintain profits.

In the interest of full disclosure, I used to work for a Gannett paper in California for 5 years. I left to move back to Oregon to accept a job that allows me to be closer to family. Like many former and current Gannett employees and media observers, I've been following the carnage over on the Gannett Blog.

When I left Gannett, the company's stock was valued at about $74 per share and the company paid a dividend of 27 cents per share. The last five dividends issued by the company were 40 cents per share, but the stock price has fallen through the floor, down to $6.32 a share on Nov. 21.

But what's happened this week? The news has been bleak for newspaper professionals, particularly at Gannett, which is leaving some empty positions unfilled permanently, buying out some workers and laying off others, meaning readers will get less of something, or a lot of things. It doesn't seem to bode well for the short-, or long-term quality of information media. But Gannett's stock price, for the time being at least, is rising for now. Up more than $2.50 a share since Nov. 21 to $8.87.

That's not enough to do much for my 401(k) account, or for the escalating numbers of people out of work. I can't imagine it will do much for readers either.

Many are blaming the Internet for causing the demise of the traditional media. It may be the insatiable demand of Wall Street that a company like Gannett maintains double-digit profit margins (well in excess of 20 percent for lots of newspaper properties) even when the wider corporate world seems to get by with 7 percent margins.

You need to read behind the business headlines. Less profit is not losing money.

I feel bad for the people who are losing job. I even feel bad for the people who are in the position of having to dismiss employees. But the more I understand about all this stuff, the less I seem to know. Because I still don't understand why Gannett's stock has fallen so low, or why a company like Google's could get so high ($279.43 per share even after it's dropped).

But after seeing what happened with mortgages and the credit market and banks, I don't feel so bad. Even the people who get paid to understand financial stuff don't seem to know what the hell they are doing.

All I do know is that a lot of friends and former colleagues are wondering if they will have jobs for long, or if they will have any money left in their retirement funds when all the dust settles. They are wondering what they will do if they can't do what they've known and put their passion into their entire adult lives. It would all be comic if it weren't so tragic.

Is my work following me home or is my home following me to work?

The lines in my online life are getting blurred. I started a Facebook page for work, in order to create a page for my employer, and ended up finding a lot of friends. So I have a mixture of work colleagues and personal friends in my contacts.

I started a Twitter account, also for work, and tied it to my Facebook account, so my Twitter updates seem to amuse some of my friends because they update people on stories about farm animals and crop reports.

I like more tidiness in my life. More separation between my work life and personal life.

The irony is, once upon a time I used to tell people that what I do is who I am. I hope that's no longer the case. I hope that who I am is more complex and distinct that my merely stating my chosen vocation.

Sometimes work helps the personal life. Sometimes my personal interests inform my professional life. But I'm not sure how comfortable I am in having the lines of my online digital pursuits at home and work overlapping so much. Maybe it's just a sign of the new media environment, but it gets a little creepy.