Q: [Comment From Sean Doyle] How should we handle the coming medicare issue?

A: Paul Krugman: I basically buy the view that Medicare spends a lot for care that’s of little or no medical value. So we can probably curb spending growth a lot with fairly simple, low-impact measures to ensure better use of clinical evidence, plus a push for more integrated care. I guess the way to look at it is that Medicare actually is a single-payer system, so that’s a place we ought to be able to emulate some of the cost-efficiency of other countries’ systems.

I guess that makes me an advocate of death panels.

I hope they post the full transcript; the applet they’re using doesn’t work with copy-paste. I’ll link if they do.

“For us, transparency has never meant that we put our internal decision-making on display. We didn’t during the campaign. We try not to here. Transparency is what the decision is, and why it was made. The process by which it was arrived at is not central.”

(Side note: Tommy Christopher had a column over at Mediaite that makes an attempt at defending the moves that the administration has made regarding the Recovery Act, but watching Robert Gibbs dance around technicalities always makes my stomach hurt.)

Other interesting tidbits:

NBC’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd, in a typical day does eight to sixteen standup interviews for NBC or MSNBC; hosts his new show, “The Daily Rundown”; appears regularly on “Today” and “Morning Joe”; tweets or posts on his Facebook page eight to ten times; and composes three to five blog posts. “We’re all wire-service reporters now,” he says.

Suddenly that 10-clips-in-a-semester requirement in reporting class doesn’t seem that demanding, does it?

From @AaronKraut, via Twitter: “Most people aren’t Chuck Todd.”

Rahm Emanuel, the White House’s chief of staff, sees press coverage as “a political strategy,” Baker says. “He’s as relentless in working reporters as he is in working congressmen. He cajoles, lobbies, berates, and trades information because he understands it’s better to work with the media than to shut us out.”

Not in the least bit surprising, but as an unabashed greenhorn I’m very curious how this goes down.

The intent of excluding the network from a tour of five back-to-back morning shows in September, 2009, “was to send a message to the rest of the press corps,” Dunn says. This message, a correspondent at another network concedes, “has had some effect.”

Major Garrett, Fox’s chief White House correspondent, insists that he and Fox are not being punished by the Administration, but adds, “The door is not shut for me. It’s just not opened first for me.” When Auletta asks Garrett whether he felt torn between his journalism and his network, he does not answer for a full twenty-seven seconds. “The human answer,” he finally says, “is that I do the best I can.”

This isn’t the first time Garrett’s hinted at maybe not being a terrible person: Bill O’Reilly brought him on during the “Barack hates FOX” scuffle, but Garrett didn’t take the bait — maybe he just didn’t want to dig himself a hole with WH staffers, but he still acted like an honest human, which is more credit than most people give him. I’m honestly not particularly familiar with his larger body of work — how does his reporting compare to that of correspondents’ from less-maligned networks?

In some cases, the Administration has been able to circumvent the mainstream media. Beginning in the campaign, Obama’s team has had a “superior grasp of new media,” Auletta writes, and has used it to connect directly with citizens. Pfeiffer says that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allowed the campaign to “go around the filter” of the press. But Auletta reports that, in an age of instant news, both the White House and the media have lost control.

Honestly, I don’t know how comfortable I would be getting messages that have “gone around the filter” — the only time I was looking forward (irrationally) to getting something straight from Obama was his choice for VP, which he said he would text to me first and then totally didn’t. For everything else, I’d much rather have somebody checking the facts before I swallow it whole straight from the Oval Office.

Okay, so the actual column isn’t that thrilling.  But I, like every other journalist I’ve ever met, really enjoy quotes that romanticize my  dying profession.  Near the end [emphasis mine]:

Journalists, for all their self-importance, are often a little naïve about the way the real world works. Sure, being a newsie is a grind, the hours are not great and the public holds us in lower esteem than the women who work the poles at Satin Dolls down the road from the Tick Tock in Lodi, but it beats working by a mile. Every day is a caper, and most reporters are attention-deprived adrenaline junkies who care only for the next story. Journalists are like cops, hugging the job close and savoring the rest of their life as they can.

That’s cool.

But even cooler, and the reason I originally found ol’ Mr. Carr, was the excerpt in the New York Times Magazine from his memoir, The Night of the Gun.  The story (crackhead-turned-awesome-journalist) is amazing, but the way he researched the book — going back and re-reporting the events like they happened to someone else — is the coolest idea I’ve heard in a long time, and it served him well, because it turned out he didn’t remember things all that clearly.

What I’m leading up to is the book’s website.  It’s thorough, interactive and deserves more than a glance — Carr videotaped a lot of his interviews and a bunch are posted with explanations, and scrolling through them is a j-nerd’s dream.  And keep your eye out for Tom Arnold — true to form, he makes a random cameo about halfway through.

Your friendly neighborhood crazy person, with an as-yet unidentified killing machine

Now, Facebook gave users the ability to tag people in status updates using — big surprise — the ‘@’ symbol.

What does this mean?  I don’t have any idea.  But Facebook’s rate of evolution certainly compares starkly to Twitter’s — yes, Facebook is way more complicated than Twitter, so there are more things to tweak, but most of Facebook’s updates this year have dragged it closer and closer to the Twitter interface.

If this makes anything clear, it’s that Twitter got it right, for the very specific task that they do.  They’re not stealing anything from Facebook; they’re just chillin’ out, being good at what they do.

Telegraph social media blogger Basheera Khan says Facebook should just pay the “bajillions” it would cost to buy Twitter (Robert Scoble puts it between $5 billion and $10 billion), but she’s wrong, for several reasons.  The biggest issue is that the users of one don’t really understand the users of the other, and they’re okay with that.  Twitter is the grown-up Facebook like Facebook is the grown-up version of MySpace — and Google Trends doesn’t mind telling us how that relationship is going.  I’m pretty sure the only people left on MySpace are 13-year-olds and underground musicians.  To be fair, though, Facebook is still whomping Twitter, at least in Google searches.  Also, Facebook said in July that it had 250 million users; eMarketer.com predicted today that 18 million would be on Twitter this year.

But that’s not the point.  Facebook just owning both sites won’t help either one, and integrating the two sites into one unwieldy social mammoth would ruin both.  Just look at Facebook Lite.  It’s basically just Facebook for people that get distracted by links and pictures.  It’s stupid.

Yes, the Twitter-leaning revisions to Facebook make it a more effective site.  But, big picture, people use Facebook for it’s profile feature, like they always did.  People use Twitter for aggregating information and putting their own tidbits into the (semi-)public sphere.  At some point (at this rate, probably not too far into the future), Facebook will have a LOT of Twitter-esque features.  That’s okay.  Tweeters don’t need the other things.

But if you’re out there, clinging to this miserable blog like Kate Winslet  to that floating door or whatever in Titanic, please.  Check out the 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army.  If I improve one life with this post… I don’t know.  Maybe it won’t take me three years to make the next one.

I’m still in love with Blogging, but I’m a very needy boyfriend.

I don’t mind taking her out, paying attention to her and giving her regular updates, but I need validation of my affections — this isn’t the first time we’ve been together, you see, and every other time we’ve broken up it’s been because I just wasn’t getting the comments, page views and pingbacks that I need.  It’s nice knowing that somebody appreciates what I’m putting out there.  I had thoughts and opinions way before I met Blogging, but it’s that feedback she brings me that keeps me wanting her around.

This time around, I think Blogging and I will be together for a while, but it’s a constant struggle against the temptations of that sultry damsel, Twitter — it’s instant gratification with her, and sometimes I can’t help myself.

I mean sometimes I find a link, it’s late at night… and she’s there.  And right away, the retweets, the responses, all of that starts right away!  How can a guy resist that?  It’s easy and only needs 140 characters’ worth of thought — which is also why Twitter’s really not relationship material.

Don’t get me wrong, Twitter’s great — she gives me a little bit from a lot of people and, if I’m in the mood to write, she’s a lot of fun for a quick fling.  But Blogging lets me think, she lets me report things and compare things, make complex connections and real, original material.  I love her.

And please, don’t tell her I’ve been hanging out with her friends Digg and Delicious.

Long story short: the AP says sure, the breaking news stuff and regular articles (“utility content,” they call it) are still cool to use just like we always have, but the stuff the AP’s got the corner on (“unique content,” like info-graphics and photos) should stay on the AP website.

Nieman blogger Zachary R. Seward says Srinandan Kasi, AP’s general counsel, says it’s all about buffing up traffic to the AP website, which isn’t something I knew they were looking for.  He quotes Kasi:

…the ability now to be able to make a decision that says, this is not something we want to generically put on the wire and send to everyone to publish everywhere. We instead think this would be useful for people to use as supplemental, to enrich their storytelling. But it’s available for them to be able to point to. And the reason to do that is, then you have a bunch of links that point to a particular piece of content. You have better search outcomes. You have better exploitation of the link value, if you will, to that piece of content. So there’s an ability to think of that piece of content differently because you’re trying to maximize traffic as compared to other content where the benefit is really about getting the initial engagement.

This strikes me as a bigger move than people are saying it is — it signals a huge shift in the AP’s approach to their online presence and, in trying to steer people towards their website, a literal 180 from back in April when they were ready to rumble with Google for passing their links around, thought that’s simplifying a bit.

Seward says this is a move that “upend the consortium’s traditional notions of syndication,” but I think it’s simpler than that: the AP isn’t changing how it syndicates, just what it syndicates.  They’re basically creating two different product streams: the stuff they give to their customers, and they stuff they keep and politely ask customers to link to.

If this secret plan thing comes to fruition, the AP won’t just be feeding news websites, it will be competing with them.  How will this affect AP customers?  They’re going to have less AP content on their websites, thus less material to pull in readers, thus less advertising to sell in a world without much to sell in the first place.  Also, how will this affect the link-sharing culture on news sites?  Places like the WashingtonPost.com are loath to post outside links in their news stories — will they do it for the Associated Press?  And, if they do, why not link out to other websites with good content too?  How about me?

[Side note: Beet.tv reported today that MSNBC.com is doing the exact opposite — they want EVERYBODY to take their content.]

Update, 8/11/09 11:22 p.m.:

Blogger hotshot and all-around dude-who’s-smarter-than-me Jeff Jarvis asks another important question via Twitter:

Big ? re AP plan: Does it monetize its “unique” content & share rev with those sending links, as the link econ demands?

Update, 8/12/09 11:30 p.m.:

Seward posted the actual document [pdf]— and explains in the comments section why he didn’t do it sooner in comment number 23 on the article.

(thank you, Kevin Robillard)