I’m going to have a followup post later today about Patch.com and (I hope) the Maplewoodian, but in the meantime I want to call attention to Alan Wolk’s fact-filled post about the NYT launch. I may have gotten my post up sooner yesterday, but he’s done a lot more research. His post starts:

One suggestion for how the newspaper industry can save itself has been for it to go hyperlocal, focusing on individual communities with the sort of local news usually provided by weekly Pennysaver type publications.

Patch Media, a heavily VC (and Google) funded company, has jumped squarely into this space and, as of today, so has the New York Times. Both efforts are happening right in my hometown. The only problem is, The Times is not doing a very good job of it.

To coin a phrase, read the whole thing. (Disclaimer: I didn’t actually coin that.) Tina Kelley has responded in Alan’s comments.

(Don’t miss my followup post about the true 800-pound gorilla of the story. Also, I tweaked this post’s headline and added a substantive Update at the end.)

Suddenly the Maplewood hyperlocal web neighborhood is crowded. The mighty NY Times today launched two local websites, each staffed with a full-time, veteran Times reporter. One site is in Brooklyn, the other covers Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn.

Venture capital-backed Patch.com also focuses on its recently launched Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn sites for now, but clearly has bigger ambitions. The company’s About page lists 20 staffers and says “Patch is run by professional editors, writers, photographers and videographers who live in or near the communities we serve, and is supported by a great team in our New York City headquarters.” The site is largely focused on the snowstorm today, and recently covered an appearance at a local bookstore by former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

The well-capitalized newcomers are contending with the original local Maplewood site, Maplewood Online, started by Jamie Ross way back in 1997. Over the years Jamie has branched out and created sister sites for South Orange, Millburn, West Orange, Montclair, Summit and Morristown.

Maplewood Online for years was a one-person show. Jamie told me today that his brother moderates the message boards shared by all of his sites, and he has a friend working for him as well. He did much of the coding for the sites himself, and graphically, the sites have a distinctly 1990s web aesthetic. Jamie also is a standup comedian and local concert organizer, but says MOL and its sister sites are his primary source of income. He’s a 1992 Rutgers graduate, with a technical background, rather than journalism.

The Times’s local site is part of the newspaper giant’s effort to find new revenue streams to bolster its cratering primary business. In the past five years the company’s stock price has plunged from the upper $40s to about $4 per share today, and throughout the country long-time daily newspapers are going out of business or declaring bankruptcy.

Times digital editor Jim Schachter explained the local strategy to Editor and Publisher:

Schachter said the sites will be accessible through an address linked to the Times’ home page, such as www.nytimes.com/fortgreene. They may expand to other communities if successful.

“The mission is to educate the community about how to be citizen journalists and contributors,” he added. “There are ‘place’ blogs everywhere. We have to create a real quality community that figures out the answers to questions on the minds of people in each place.”

But he admits the money-making options are unknown. “There is no conceivable way that a site staffed with a full-time New York Times journalist can pencil out as profitable,” he said. “We are trying to figure out using our people as experimenters if there is a model that combines journalism, technology and advertising that would work.”

The Times’s local New Jersey sites are staffed by Tina Kelley, an acquaintance who lives a few blocks from me in Maplewood. Tina, who can sometimes be spotted around town knitting at local events (how’s that for a hyperlocal bloggish touch?), has been on the Times staff for nearly a decade — the nearby picture is from the Charlie Rose show last year, when she was interviewed about a story she wrote on mysterious bat deaths. (I grabbed that photo before her site launched, where I could get her “official” headshot. But then I’d lose my chance to show up in Google searches for “mysterious bat deaths.”)

The site launched after 5 p.m. today, and Tina’s inaugural lead post explains the concept:

For those wondering why we chose Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange, when there are so many new Web sites and publications on paper here already, it’s very simple, actually: The Times wanted me to launch this experiment in New Jersey, and I live in Maplewood. And I knew the conversation here would be rich, fun and meaningful, because intriguing people live here, and for good reasons.

Jamie Ross’s theory was that the Times and Patch.com both started in the Maplewood region because there already is a booming online community in the area — Jamie has 8,000 registered participants on his message boards, and the flagship site has a frontpage script that currently reads, “There have been 6,927,419 visits to this page since August 20th, 2001.” But Tina said no, it really was just as simple as the fact that this is where she lives.

Tina’s NYT site already has taught me something — there is yet a fourth Maplewood site, called the Maplewoodian. If I were still a real journalist I would work them into the story and try to reach the editor, but I’ve spent far too much time on this already, and I don’t have a night-desk editor to snarl at me for not making a phone call. So all you get is a screenshot:

For a website focusing on the hyperlocal market, it seems remarkably hard to connect with anyone from Patch.com. There is no phone number or email address on the website itself, and I’ve sent out a dozen feelers to local editors and New York staff via Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as using the site’s feedback page. The only NYC phone number listed for Patch Media Corporation turns out to be a lawyer’s voicemail. One of the local staffers eventually contacted me on Twitter and said she would try to find someone to talk with me, but that was the last I heard. Maybe they can weigh in in the comments.

Jamie was in town first, so I’ll let him have the last word. I asked him what he thinks about all the competition, and he said: “I think MOL will survive, but it’s tricky to go up against a company that has billions of dollars.”

Clearly there’s a market for local information on the web — it’s just not clear how to make any money generating it. It’s also not clear to me whether it’s worth my while delving into the local market myself from time to time, as I have today, or if I should just stick to my primary interest in national politics. So this is an experiment — I’d love to get feedback in the comments.

Update: Hey, since when did the venerable News-Record of Maplewood and South Orange start being available online? And why wasn’t I notified?

More seriously, why doesn’t Worrall Community Newspapers Inc. (parent company of the N-R and its sister publications) promote the website on the front page of the print News-Record? All there is now is a nondescript URL — www.localsource.com — sandwiched between the date and the price. Last time I looked at localsource.com it was a mess, and you couldn’t find Maplewood stuff on it. Now, Maplewood.LocalSource.Com seems to have most of the N-R content, and a fair amount of advertising.

So I’ve corrected my headline — there are FIVE hyperlocal sites in the Maplewood Blogolopolis^TM.

Tom Daschle withdrew as nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services yesterday, reportedly to enable him to audition for a better-paying movie gig as Harry Potter’s dad.

The Washington Post reports (emphasis added):

Obama officials had sought a seamless transition, nominating most of his Cabinet at record pace and taking office ready to implement a raft of new policies. His reversal yesterday suggested that speed may have come at a cost, and that Obama, despite the overwhelming popularity he had upon taking office and the major challenges facing the nation, will not be spared from the same kind of scrutiny his predecessors have faced.

MoDo takes the gloves off:

It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

Dana Milbank wrote, “If this is Obama’s honeymoon, one shudders to think what a lovers’ quarrel would look like. “

Going “meta” for a moment, the honeymoon may be over for the “Honeymoon-Over Watch.” A Google search for Obama honeymoon returns 2,880,000 results, indicating that the metaphor may not be quite as fresh and insightful as I imagined when I turned it into a category on my blog.

I think the end of the honeymoon is a good thing — and not because of any ill will toward Obama. I see it as a sign that Obama is making a transition from being the first African-American president to the much more essential and powerful role of being simply the American president.

For now, it may still be the case that only an Establishment liberal like Maureen Dowd can call Obama “arrogant” without prompting accusations that it’s a code word for “uppity.” We are just a few short months removed from the ludicrous notion that observations about Obama’s “inexperience” constitute some sort of racial code. But as Obama adapts to a role where he can no longer vote “present,” he will have additional opportunities to attract criticism from across the political spectrum. If people grow used to the idea that it’s possible to criticize a black person without being a racist, our society will have made an important step toward racial equality.

(Photo: UPI)

As I’ve said before, I expect now that Obama is safely ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the cutthroat competitiveness of the news media is going to drive more and more reporters to go after the only President we have.

Campbell Brown has a show on CNN called “No Bias, No Bull.” When you market yourself that way, you have to be prepared to smack down anybody, “without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved,” in the immortal words that used to guide The New York Times. To her credit, Brown is a rare example of a mainstream journalist who actually took a hard shot at Obama before the election — dinging him for rejecting campaign finance limits once it became clear that Obama’s fund-raising power was much greater than McCain’s. She even quoted an Obama supporter saying the flip-flop met the definition of a “hypocrite.”

She raised the stakes in a commentary on last night’s show, using the H word without the fig leaf of attributing it to someone else. The piece, which describes how the administration is seeking a waiver from its own restrictions on hiring lobbyists, is available today on CNN.com, under a headline “Commentary: Obama’s Hypocrisy is Showing.”

Mr. President, if you want to hire former lobbyists because you think they are the best people to do the job, then hire former lobbyists. Just don’t hold a big news conference first to tell us how your administration is going to be so different from previous administrations in that you won’t be hiring lobbyists.

Don’t make your disdain for lobbyists and your pledges that they won’t wield influence in your administration a centerpiece of your campaign.

It’s the hypocrisy and the double-talk that makes so many of us so cynical. Do what you think is best for the country. Just be straight with us about how you’re going to do it.

(To be clear, there was a flurry of commentary when the administration first sought a waiver to the lobbying rules just a day after promulgating them. But this is the first time I’ve seen such sharp criticism on the issue from a nominally nonpartisan source.)

While the revolving door between government and lobbyists can be unseemly, lobbying is a form of free speech. Some regulation of lobbying is appropriate, and government officials need to make a special effort to seek out the opinions of people and groups that cannot afford a fancy office on K Street. But the reason why lobbyists are able to command high salaries for plying their trade is that they have substantial expertise in the ways of Washington and the business interests of their employer — it would make little sense to exclude such people from the government completely.

Interestingly, the lobbyist that sparked Brown’s commentary is intended to be chief of staff for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. I haven’t returned to the subject of Geithner since writing, just after the tax controversy first surfaced, that I didn’t think his tax “peccadillos” should sink his candidacy. Geithner has been confirmed, but I’ve changed my mind about his suitability for the office he now holds. The turning point for me was reading the objections of the three Senate Democrats who voted against his confirmation. As Sen. Tom Harkin said:

He has stated this was an innocent mistake and that there was no intent to deliberately avoid paying the required taxes. However, the IMF informs us that in order to avoid exactly this kind of situation, its U.S. citizen employees are fully informed of their obligation to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes and must sign a form acknowledging that they understand this obligation.

Moreover, the IMF gives its U.S. citizen employees quarterly wage statements that detail their U.S. tax liabilities. The IMF pays its U.S. citizen employees an amount equal to the employer’s half of the payroll taxes with the expectation that the individual will use that money to pay the IRS.

Geithner failed to pay the required taxes for four successive years. When the problem was discovered, he was billed for back taxes only for the last two of those years, because the IRS statute of limitations had passed on the earlier two years. He finally settled up for the earlier two years only after being nominated as Treasury Secretary.

I hope this guy does a really good job managing the financial crisis. Even if he does, I don’t think it will be enough to justify the fact that the man we’ve put in charge of overseeing the IRS appears to be a tax cheat.

(Photos: CNN.com; Geithner swearing in from LA Times)

Captain Pete Hegseth of the Minnesota National Guard was deployed in Iraq in 2005-06. After returning he helped found Vets for Freedom, whose mission is “to educate the American public about the importance of achieving success in these conflicts” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The group is officially non-partisan, but based on their mission, it’s not too hard to guess which Presidential candidate they preferred.

As Hegseth writes this week in National Review Online (which for some reason still lists him as a lieutenant):

Our group, Vets for Freedom, ran millions of dollars’ worth of television and radio advertising this year that directly challenged Obama’s policies toward Iraq and the surge. We aggressively instigated his return trip to Iraq and called on him to tell the truth about the success of the surge. We believed his stated policy prescriptions for Iraq were outdated and pressured him to reconsider his rigid timeline for withdrawal.

Then Obama won. Now what?

But on Inauguration Day, our approach will change—as a candidate becomes our commander-in-chief. We will not do to President Obama what others did to President Bush. Our brothers are still in harm’s way, and Obama is their commander-in-chief, just as he is ours.

We will support President Obama whenever possible, persuade him at decisive and deliberative moments, and constructively oppose him when he pursues policies we deem detrimental to battlefield success. Success on the battlefield—as well as the health of our military—must be our lodestar, as we seek to help our new president defend our nation.

Thank you for your wise counsel, Captain Hegseth, and for your service to our country.

President Bush has outpaced former President Reagan when it comes to calling evil by its name. What remains to be seen is whether history will vindicate Bush as it has Reagan.

From President Bush’s farewell address to the nation last night (hat tip: K-Lo):

As we address these challenges — and others we cannot foresee tonight — America must maintain our moral clarity. I’ve often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere. Freeing people from oppression and despair is eternally right. This nation must continue to speak out for justice and truth. We must always be willing to act in their defense — and to advance the cause of peace.

I’m all in favor of tolerance, open-mindedness and humility. I try to remain alert to the possibility that other cultures, belief systems and ideologies may have something to teach me. But at some point, open-mindedness must give way to moral clarity.

I’ve not always thought this way. In 1983 I was one of the many liberals who sneered when President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” So simplistic, I thought, and dangerous. I loved America and certainly preferred it to the Soviet Union, but the Soviets were an important force in the world, and I thought it was naive and arrogant to speak out so strongly against them.

I didn’t learn about it until years later, but I would have been even more scornful if I knew about the philosophy of the Cold War that Reagan had voiced several years before he became president, in a conversation with his future National Security Advisor, Richard Allen:

“So,” he said, “about the Cold War: My view is that we win and they lose. What do you think of that?”

What a simpleton, I would have thought. But by the time I first heard of the conversation, America had won the Cold War — and Reagan, more than any other individual person, made it happen. He created the conditions for victory by bankrupting the Soviet Union with an escalation of the arms race — which I also derided at the time. While I joined others in rolling my eyes, he startled his staff and captured the world’s imagination with his clarion call: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And then, when he sensed the time was right and that Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet, Reagan pushed past harsh criticism from his right and engineered a landmark nuclear arms treaty, signed at the White House in 1987, as shown in the photo above.

Two years later, the Berlin Wall fell, and two years after that, the Soviet Union fell.

In context, Reagan’s evil empire passage squarely attacks the sense of moral relativism that still guides so much criticism of the United States, both domestically and abroad:

I urge you to beware the temptation of pride – the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

The Soviet Union was, in fact, an evil empire, but I and many others chose instead to focus on America’s shortcomings. The starkness of the contrast between the two great powers became clear to me only in retrospect, but Reagan saw it from the start, and never wavered in his opposition to evil.

Which brings us back to President Bush.

In his January 2002 State of the Union address, Bush famously declared that Iraq, Iran and North Korea constituted an “axis of evil.” Just over four months earlier, I and millions of others had watched evil unfold on live television, as the second plane plowed into the South Tower and the second fireball announced that this was no mere accident. So in the State of the Union address, my main quarrel with Bush’s formulation was not “evil,” but “axis,” evoking as it did the formal World War II partnership of Germany, Japan and Italy.

When a North Korean ship smuggling Scud missiles was intercepted in the Middle East later that year, I warmed somewhat to the term “axis,” but I still think it was problematic. More broadly, however, I’m a fan of Bush’s references to evil and evil-doers — so much so that I named the blog after someone else’s famous quote about evil.

Bush started talking about evil in the days after 9/11 and continued during the run-up to the Iraq War and beyond. He is faulted for insisting before the war that Saddam had — or more accurately, still had — stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Even though Bill Clinton was convinced, both as President in 1998 and through Bush’s overthrow of Saddam in 2003, that Saddam had WMD, Bush was labeled a “liar” when no such stockpiles were found. I suppose a case can be made that Bush was guilty of believing what he wanted to believe about WMD, but the idea that he lied about it has always been silly — why lie about a momentous matter when you know the lie must be discovered?

WMD or no, Bush’s liberation of Iraq rid the world of a truly evil regime. I still believe it was the right thing to do, and I’m not alone — support for the war has never dipped below a third of all Americans, although until recently you wouldn’t guess that from the tenor of media coverage. Iraq War supporters are a minority, but we are not a fringe group.

For better or worse, Bush’s legacy will always be inextricably tied to the war in Iraq. This means, as I’ve written before, there is a chance Bush will be remembered years from now as the man who planted the first stable democracy in the heart of the Arab Middle East. If some day Islamic fascism joins Soviet communism in the category of defeated ideologies, a President’s clarity about the United States as a bulwark against evil may again be a large part of the reason.

(Photo of Reagan and Gorbachev from the Reagan Library. Berlin Wall photo from Agence France-Presse. Graph from Pew Research.)

Joe owed a hell of a lot less tax than Timothy Geithner.

(Instalanche! Welcome Instapundit readers, and readers from TigerHawk and Living al Dente.)

There’s already plenty of opposition to Obama in the right-wing fever swamps of the Internets, of course. (I would link that sentence to Ann Coulter’s site, but she’s such a cartoon character, I don’t want my vast audience to give her any traffic. That’ll fix her.)

But eventually, even mainstream media outlets will turn their guns on the man who, in the eternal formulation of insider Washington, will become known as “this President.” No matter how much the media was in the tank for Obama during the campaign, no matter how enthusiastic they were in celebrating the coming of BAM-A-LOT, eventually Obama and his Administration will make missteps that even the most liberal papers cannot ignore.

We’re not there yet, but there are early signs. In the current dust-up over Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s tax problems, even the left-wing Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial page has admitted there is a double standard. “We can only imagine what we would have said had Geithner been a Bush appointee,” the paper editorialized. As if worried that the Obama Fan Club might revoke the paper’s decoder ring, the editorial quickly added: “Should this news derail the nomination? Probably not.” (Hat tip: Taranto)

As it happens, I agree that the news should “probably not” derail the nomination. The position is critically important, and Geithner seems to have done an outstanding job coping with the financial crisis as President of the NY Federal Reserve. But Taranto points out that Geithner actually accepted reimbursement from his employer for self-employment taxes that he did not pay, which if true makes it seem more serious than a mere mistake.

The starkest irony in this is the difference between the journalistic soft shoe over the tax problems of the man nominated as head tax collector, compared with the instant feeding frenzy that erupted during the campaign over minor tax issues when an ordinary citizen posed a challenging question to The One.

The difference now, of course, is that journalists no longer have to worry that Obama might lose the election. Now the natural competitiveness of the news media will begin to overwhelm partisanship, at least until the 2012 race heats up. The honeymoon isn’t over yet, and it certainly won’t end before the Inaugural. But starting next Tuesday (ok maybe Wednesday), when President Obama doesn’t bring the troops home, doesn’t close Guantanamo, doesn’t end the recession, doesn’t deliver national health insurance, doesn’t roll back global warming and make the oceans recede — or at least doesn’t do any of these things as fast as the Left would like — then things like the peccadillos of Tim Geithner will start to get more coverage.

Have you heard about the (pro-) gay-rights bill our President signed right before Christmas? Probably not, if you rely on the mainstream media for news. In fact, even the blogosphere has been strangely quiet about it, although Gay Patriot launched an item about it this morning.

His succinct wrapup (a reference to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell):

Bush increased American gay rights, Clinton took away American gay rights. Facts are facts.

Hat tip: A Disgruntled Republican.

The Web Goddess and I watched the Obamavision special via DVR while snuggling together on the couch. We’re a red-and-blue couple, but in the spirit of bipartisanship, I wore a purple shirt.

I started checking out of the campaign emotionally after the final debate (see “Stick a Fork in Mac, He’s Toast“). So tonight (ok, last night) I took a couple of minor jabs at The One, but afterwards I muted the Obamatron and said to Nina, “he’s good.” I’m in the mode of trying to make the best of the coming Obama presidency, and I was impressed by the performance. His communication skills rival Reagan’s and Clinton’s. I then navigated the DVR to the new Law & Order: SVU that I missed Tuesday night. Up now with a touch of insomnia, I learn that apparently the Phillies won the World Series.

The Corner’s still on the case, however. Some of the Cornerites are trying too hard — “If any undecided voters are moved by this nearly unwatchable garbage, then we will get what we deserve.” But there’s a link to a useful AP deconstruction of the ways in which “Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial.” Then there was this:

I was struck by the guy at the Ford plant; it noted that his father and grandfather had worked at Ford and retired with full benefits. And now he’s only paid to work every other week. Is he suffering currently because of the state of the economy and George Bush’s economic policies, or because his dad and grandad’s union extracted exorbitant benefits and retirement packages that mean Ford is now saddled with crushing financial obligations?

… which eloquently captures the half-formed thoughts that were swirling through my mind at the time.

Nina and I both joked about the “amber waves of grain” that opened the show. Later on we saw the “purple mountain’s majesties” in the backdrop of the Albuquerque (Hi Mom!) vignette. K-Lo came through with the best dig:

“He had me at the waving wheat.” [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
That’s how Rachel Maddow began her show tonight. Must turn off MSNBC.

I just set the DVR to record Obama’s half-hour, blanket-the-airwaves infomercial, since I’ll be out when it airs. It’s a good reminder that I wanted to blog about a woman-bites-candidate story I saw on CNN.

I first became aware of the existence of Campbell Brown when she questioned the significance of Sarah Palin’s role as commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard. It struck me as a fair line of questioning, albeit certainly aggressive, but the McCain camp reacted by canceling McCain’s appearance with fellow CNN talking head Larry King. That’ll fix ‘em!

To her credit, this week Campbell proved she can jump ugly in both directions:

One year ago, [Obama] made a promise. He pledged to accept public financing and to work with the Republican nominee to ensure that they both operated within those limits.

Then it became clear to Sen. Obama and his campaign that he was going to be able to raise on his own far more cash than he would get with public financing. So Obama went back on his word.

She even quoted an Obama supporter using the word “hypocrite” in describing the situation. You go, girl!

After a lively conversation in the comments of an earlier post, I’m tempted to go through Campbell Brown’s commentary line by line and look for anything that might be interpreted as “racial code,” but I suspect both she and her editors did that beforehand. If she were commentating on Fox News, people would be straining to find dog-whistle language in it.

And speaking of dogs and strained metaphors, my “woman-bites-candidate” reference is not racial code — it’s poking fun at left-leaning media.