Andrew Sullivan has blogged about it, and rightly, to my mind, suggests:

“There must be plenty of medical records and obstetricians and medical eye-witnesses prepared to testify to Sarah Palin’s giving birth to Trig. There must be a record of Bristol’s high school attendance for the past year. And surely, surely, the McCain camp did due diligence on this. But the noise around this story is now deafening, and the weirdness of the chronology sufficient to rise to the level of good faith questions. So please give us these answers — and provide medical records for Sarah Palin’s pregnancy — and put this to rest.”

As I write this, the mainstream media is staying away from this one (according to a quick Google News search). It is, after all, an outrageous charge. And it maligns a 17-year-old girl who deserves to be treated fairly and not dragged through the mud.

What should mainstream news organizations do with this? I think they have a responsibility to investigate it and discover the truth, and report it, whichever way this turns out. (If Palin were lying about this, it should disqualify her from holding the VP’s office, at least to my mind.)

This is seeming like it could turn out to be similar to the John Edwards affair case, where the National Enquirer was the media outlet correctly reporting that the presidential candidate indeed was having an affair. Some traditional news organizations chased the story, but couldn’t confirm it. It’s probably fair to say that most “real journalists” believed that the Enquirer was making it up. They ended up getting beat by a cheesy supermarket tabloid.

Now we have a left-leaning blog publishing an explosive story that most people probably don’t believe, because it sounds so absurd (and the author is hiding his name, which is an enormous red flag). But the mainstream press needs to make sure it doesn’t get caught again as with the Edwards affair.

Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor who writes a blog called Media Nation, thinks that while it may be worthwhile for the mainstream press to investigate and (most likely) debunk the rumor, if it indeed turns out to be false, it shouldn’t be published. He writes:

“The job of the press is to ask questions and then to present its findings to the public — or, in this case, if it found nothing, to do its best to make sure the story never saw the light of day. … This is the definition of a story that shouldn’t be hashed out publicly.”

Sorry, Dan, I totally disagree. Long gone are the days when “the press” had the power to keep stuff like this under wraps, taking a Father Knows Best approach and not sharing the “sordid” details with the public. This thing is already spreading like wildfire, without being mentioned by mainstream news organizations. It’s going to play out with or without the mainstream press taking part.

This is a strong rumor that’s already got legs. News organizations need to investigate, and if they can confirm that it’s false, they should report it. It doesn’t have to be a big deal or take up a 24-hour news cycle. A simple short story — Palin baby rumor has been debunked — would suffice.

It’s archaic media thinking that says the media needs to stifle this thing because it’s too unseemly for us to touch. We no longer live in the age when rumors were heard only by journalists, and those journalists decided whether to pass them along to the public. The public is in on this rumor, and they deserve to be served by professional journalists who are capable of debunking or confirming it.

One last point: I’ve seen arguments that the media must sit on this because it would hurt Bristol, who’s still a kid. The problem is, she’s already been tossed in the mud, and millions of people are finding out about this rumor this weekend. That cat’s out of the bag. Mainstream media would serve her interests best by turning up evidence that the DailyKos charges are false. And if the rumor is true, the American public certainly needs to know about Sarah Palin’s character.

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I want to take a slightly different angle. Many newspapers pre-write obituaries of notable people in their communities. Some staff journalist or perhaps a librarian is charged with writing or updating a canned obituary when a local big-wig goes into the hospital, for instance, so it can be pulled out when the time comes.

But why bother with that task at all? An argument can be made that when Mr/Ms Whomever checks out of the planet, the information about his/her life is but a Google- or Wikipedia-search away. Instead of writing an original obit, a link obit just may be a better way to present a notable life.

The modern obit writer may serve the subject better by amassing a collection of suitable links: to a biography, video interviews, best writings, most famous quotes, etc. Yelvington may be right: The traditional obituary is already in the grave.

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I’ve been reading the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, to my youngest daughter. It’s one of my favorite sci-fi books and I’m enjoying re-reading it. Here’s a quick synopsis from Wikipedia:

“Ender’s Game (1985) is one of the best-known novels by Orson Scott Card. It is set in Earth’s future where mankind has barely survived two invasions by the ‘buggers,’ an insectoid alien race, and the International Fleet is preparing for war. In order to find and train the eventual commander for the anticipated third invasion, the world’s most talented children, including the extraordinary Ender Wiggin, are taken into a training center known as the Battle School at a very young age.”

While Ender is the main subject of the book, his brother, Peter, and sister, Valentine, also play a role back on Earth. (All are child geniuses.) A sub-plot has Peter and Valentine pretending to be adults on “the nets” and posing as intellectuals capable of influencing masses of people. In Card’s world (the year is 2135), the great debates of the day take place on the nets.

While there’s plenty of time for Internet discussions to turn around, I suppose, I can’t help but think that Card wasn’t terribly prescient with this prediction. In Ender’s Game, “the nets” are democratic and participative — anyone can join them, as long as they have the intellect to keep up — but there’s no problem with too much noise, trolls, spammers, and plain old stupidity.

Maybe Card was looking well beyond 2008 with his prediction of worldwide networked discussions being meaningful and orderly. Perhaps by 2135 we’ll have really good spam filters. But from the vantage point of 2008, it’s hard to imagine the author’s optimism about online digital discourse playing out.

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Yes, it’s the perfect storm for the newspaper industry. They’d be hurting from the structural change going on in media consumption even with a good economy. Add the sucky economy and this likely puts some newspapers at the brink.

My wife, by the way, is back in school to become a (school) librarian. At least I know she’s going into a field that’s in demand!

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I ask because I had my hair cut this morning, and I had a conversation with my stylist about gray hair. He’s in his 30s, but DYES his hair gray because he likes how it looks. (Huh?! Most of us with real gray hair would prefer to go the other direction.) Anyway, he told me that with the bad economy and lots of people getting laid off, his shop is seeing a big wave of guys in their 40s and 50s come in to get their hair dyed darker. It’s because they think looking younger will help them find new jobs, of course.

Have you noticed this among your journalist friends who’ve been laid off recently? Have you done it yourself?

Me? I’m sticking with what nature and time have done with my hair. Can’t say I like the gray, but I can live with it.

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It’s a small thing, I know, but an indicator of editors stuck in old mindsets.

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Here are a couple examples of comic avatars. Also see the comic avatar of me at the top of this page.

Leave a comment here or send me a private message. Thanks for your help!

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Here’s a captcha that I ran into the other day. Ugh. It’s not exactly a user-friendly way to encourage someone to post to your website. It takes some real dedication to slog through this one.

(Sorry, I don’t remember which site I spotted this on. I grabbed a screen shot and stored it, and by the time I spotted this on my desktop I’d forgotten where I found this.)

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Surprisingly, I’m still seeing a lot of “copyright 2007″ notices, especially on e-mail newsletters. Here are a few screen grabs from e-mails that I received in recent days:

For those of you who still need reminding, stop publishing in the past.

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Now, I have a daughter around the age of the girls in this video, and I realized after viewing this that Youtube is giving me a glimpse into the once hidden world of today’s teenagers. As a parent, obviously I’m not likely to be aware of this odd behavior (and probably worse) occurring when friends get together. But with this current generation of teens, they don’t keep their behavior (including bad stuff) to themselves; they post it for the world to see!

This is pretty amazing when you think about it. Sociologists must be having a field day with stuff like this.

For me, along with artist Steve Kearsley, last week I launched techGRL.com, an online comic strip that has as its heroine a 15-year-old, tech-crazy girl. So I need to try to get into the heads of girls that age. While observing my own daughter is useful in that regard, even better is the opportunity to peer directly into the world of teenage girls.

Thanks, Youtube!

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