I keep falling behind on the linkposts. Here are three media-centric links that I hope you follow. This is some of the best reading on media (new and old) I’ve run across lately. I’ll try to resume more political linkblogging soon. Maybe (football season is looming, after all).

Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing, Pt. 1 (Bill Wyman, Splice Today)

The commentators most caught up in the romanticized notion of newspaper cite the potential loss of the newspapers

Stem cell policy shift brings a sinking feeling (John Kass, Chicago Tribune)

In signing the order last week, the president said that the Bush administration, which strictly limited such research, had offered a false choice between science and morality. He said his new order “is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda

It’s been kind of fun to watch the meltdown among the elitist left over Gov. Sarah Palin.

Locally, Cory Crow has been tracking the reaction of the Chron‘s erratic features editor, Kyrie “MeMo” O’Connor, whose blogging has been known occasionally to sound feminist-victim/sisterhood themes.

Here’s one additional entertaining comment from MeMo that a commenter on Crow’s site pointed out:

Honest to Pete, I’d lay odds my day-to-day job is harder than being governor of Alaska.

Posted by: Kyrie at September 4, 2008 03:56 PM

Ah. Yes. Obviously.

(Unintentional) comedy gold.

Oh, and the Chron announced its latest downsizing last week, for what it’s worth.

KTRK-13 posts a story from AP, with the following headline:

Leaders plan to avoid freeway flooding tragedies

My first thought (before reading the story) was, does that mean they don’t plan on driving down into flooded underpasses?

I’m not sure if the headline came from AP or from KTRK.

Campaign contributions: O’Quinn gives Bell a boost (Kelley Shannon, AP)

Buoyed by a big-dollar donor and a favorable debate performance, Democrat Chris Bell began airing more television ads today as he tried to surge through a new momentum in the Texas governor’s race.

I really shouldn’t be surprised any more by some of the truly bad copy turned out by professional writers AND editors in the field of journalism, but I am nonetheless.

The Kos-Armstrong blogola scandal is already hugely entertaining (synopsis here, for anybody who hasn’t been following).

The details are fascinating enough — allegations (from the right, but curiously, also from the left blogosphere) about pay-blogging without proper disclosure, threats of lawsuits, emails urging supporters to starve the story of oxygen. It’s a regular blog soap opera. Not quite as good as a full-blown Objectivist schism, but still entertaining.

What is most fun is to watch certain members of the reading-challenged community who were literally frothing about Ben Domenech and Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher (conservatives all) try to explain why this matter is no big deal, and that it’s just more treachery from conservative meanies!

Err, yeah, that’s what it is.

In any case, feel free to email me if you’d like me to write nice things about someone on the blog. And send money. Lots of it.

Big congrats to my buddy Cindy Chaffin and the crew over at Texas Gigs.

They just won a much-deserved EPpy in the category “Best Internet Entertainment Service under 1 million unique monthly visitors.”

I didn’t expect that an indie/outsider/non-mediot site like TexasGigs would actually win the award from the pros, but I guess it’s hard to deny what they’ve done with the site.

Good for them! I hope Cindy doesn’t forget all of us little people who have tilted a brew with her at crappy bars in Deep Ellum now that she’s all famous!

Can George Bush win back the press? (Howard Fineman, MSNBC)

For the first time in his political career, George W. Bush finds himself in an uncomfortable position: he has to deal with the press on its terms, not his. For such a proud, controlling

I don’t normally get too excited about awards from outfits like Editor and Publisher, but this year’s EPpy nominations are an exception for one reason: I see that TexasGigs is one of three finalist for an Interactive Media EPpy, in the category Best Internet Entertainment Service under 1 million unique monthly visitors.

My buddy Cindy Chaffin started TexasGigs as a music blog about the Dallas/Texas live music years ago, and more recently Mike Orren and the Pegasus crew joined forces with her to turn the thing into this huge, interactive, local music web destination. Congrats to them for the recognition!

Elsewhere, I see that the Austin American Statesman was nominated in the category Best Overall Design of an Internet Service under 1 million unique monthly visitors. They launched a very smart redesign of their site at the end of 2005 that was quite an improvement.

In contrast, Chron.com did not make the finalists in the Best Overall Design of an Internet Service over 1 million unique monthly visitors. Unfortunately, their 2005 redesign suffered flaws from the start — flaws that resulted in less functionality (and flaws like limited RSS feeds that still haven’t been addressed). But, they can serve ads more efficently than before, so that’s exciting.