Trump. Palin. More Trump and more Palin. Yet more Trump. Mama Grizzly back on the prowl. Gary Busey is voting for Trump (what an endoresement BTW). Sarah Palin is redesigning her website, could this maybe mean she is running for president? Politico expects me to take them serious as a news organization when this is your front page. WTF.

Mr. Beck, a conservative Jeremiah and talk-radio phenomenon, burst into television prominence in 2009 by taking the forsaken 5 p.m. slot on Fox News and turning it into a juggernaut. A conjurer of conspiracies who spotted sedition everywhere he looked, Mr. Beck struck a big chord and ended up on the cover of Time magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and held rallies all over the country that were mobbed with acolytes. He achieved unheard-of ratings, swamped the competition and at times seemed to threaten the dominion of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity at Fox.

But a funny thing happened on the way from the revolution. Since last August, when he summoned more than 100,000 followers to the Washington mall for the “Restoring Honor” rally, Mr. Beck has lost over a third of his audience on Fox—a greater percentage drop than other hosts at Fox. True, he fell from the great heights of the health care debate in January 2010, but there has been worrisome erosion—more than one million viewers—especially in the younger demographic.

He still has numbers that just about any cable news host would envy and, with about two million viewers a night, outdraws all his competition combined. But the erosion is significant enough that Fox News officials are willing to say—anonymously, of course; they don’t want to be identified as criticizing the talent—that they are looking at the end of his contract in December and contemplating life without Mr. Beck [....]

The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009. [...]

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

To say I am a huge fan of Keith would be an understatement. I was as shocked as most people when his show ended Friday and he left MSNBC, with literally no notice. No reason. I’ve ponder it a lot, what he meant to “liberal” media. And well, I think this sums it up pretty well.

The irony here—and it’s a big one—is that one of Olbermann’s best contributions to our political dialogue was going after the bogus idea of false equivalency, that people on the left and the right are always equally bad in equal proportions while only centrists are the possessors of beauty and light and truth. Ironic because no one has been a bigger victim of false equivalency than Keith Olbermann himself.

That is so spot-on I don’t have anything to add.

Can’t wait to read Dan Gilmore’s most recent work. A quick review via Boing Boing:

Mediactive is divided into three sections. The first section is a history of the dismal state of current media—partisan and bickering, financially troubled, insufficiently critical of power and overly sensitive to Internet upstarts. Gillmor explains how reporters can (and sometimes do) use online media to get their stories straight, and in so doing, explains how you can do the same, and become a smarter consumer of, participant in, and maker of news. This is a crash-course in being a better consumer of the news, asking active questions about how the news you see and hear and read is constructed.

Part two is an information age journalism program encapsulated in a swiftly moving section on using tools and systems to make better news. Even if you’re not planning on starting up your own blog, wiki, mailing list, or even a newspaper, this section should be required reading for anyone hoping to understand how smart use of the right tool can put the news in the service to its community, structured around the values of truth, humility, and honor.

Part three is a big-think piece on the way that institutions—from j-schools to the FTC and Congress—can and should change the way they do things to clear the way for journalism that works with the net, not against it. Covering issues from pedagogy to DRM law, from comment moderation to Network Neutrality, Gillmor moves into the macro-scale with the same deftness that he brings to the details in part two.

Mediactive is available as a free, Creative Commons-licensed download. As you might expect, Gillmor’s Mediactive site dedicated to the book contains many other resources and a robust conversation on the book and topics it addresses.

Back in 1999, Mark Frauenfelder wrote an article about new web tools that made it easier to do something called “blogging.” His editors at the technology magazine The Industry Standard declined to publish it, concluding that blogging didn’t really seem like a very big deal. Turns out it was.

It’s certainly been a very good thing for Frauenfelder, who deployed the tools he learned about for his ill-fated article to start posting interesting links and offbeat observations on boingboing.net. In time, three friends who shared a similar appetite for curious information filtered through a nonmainstream worldview—Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz—joined him. And by the mid-2000s, Boing Boing had become one of the most-read and linked-to blogs in the world.

We know what happens next: This hobby morphs into a successful business. But Boing Boing’s version of that tale is a little different. Frauenfelder and his partners didn’t rake in investment capital, recruit a big staff and a hotshot CEO, or otherwise attempt to leverage themselves into a “real” media company. They didn’t even rent an office. They continued to treat their site as a side project, even as it became a business with revenue comfortably in the seven figures. Basically, they declined to professionalize. You could say they refused to grow up.

It tells the story of how a few folks can do something they enjoy, not sell out, and make a profit all at the same time. Well worth a read.

When you are putting together a political ad for voters in West Virginia and you do a casting call, it might not be a good idea to say you are need  actors that look like “hicks.” Also helpful if you film the spot in the state you are going to run the ad, and not Pennsylvania.