At a time when American journalists are challenged by emerging media on one flank and covering a historic presidential race on another, an even tougher challenge has surfaced.

The current financial crisis is among the most difficult issues ever faced by news reporters, and it may be among the most important.

The issues are so complex, few people inside or outside the media truly understand them. And the potential for worldwide harm is frightening.

This isn’t just about some folks who took out adjustable mortgages they really couldn’t afford. Sure, it’s called “the sub-prime mortgage crisis,” but bad mortgages are only one leg of a writhing, squirming octopus that has strangled the world’s banking and investment industry.

I’ve read, listened to or watched numerous explanations of “derivatives.” I understand what they are, but after all the coverage I only have passing familiarity with the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different ways they are used by investors to hedge their losses or by speculators looking for quick profits.

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is that every dollar a homeowner puts on the line through a mortage is spun into hundreds of dollars by investors and speculators. So a simple bank foreclosure, while tragic for the homeowner, spirals through the investment world causing many times more damage.

It’s easy to blame greedy speculators. And any government bailout plan that bails them out would be wrong, plain and simple.

But it’s not that simple.

The real villains are the people at the top of government and big business who allowed our financial institutions to reach this point - where unregulated financial transactions - millions of them - could put our nation and world at this kind of risk.

And where has the media been? Unwilling or unable - I suspect the latter - to first understand and then clearly report, what is happening.

Unfortunately, now that the crisis is here, the same challenges exist. It’s a very complicated issue and most of the coverage seems to be focused on the problem and reaction to it - not the cause.

As a journalist and a consumer, I’m rooting for national financial reporters - whether print, radio, television or Internet is their medium - to get to the bottom of what caused this mess and what is needed to fix it.

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote, I trust the journalists more than I trust the government to get it right. But it’s not going to be easy.

I’m not looking forward to the renewed “culture wars” that Sarah Palin’s nomination seems to have set off.

It’s tough enough to be a journalist - the world is a complex place. It isn’t easy to ask the right questions, sort through a maze of information and put together a clear, crisp story that is fair, honest and accurate.

Add in the cultural biases that are tearing America into two almost equal halves - witness the closeness of the last two presidential elections - and the job becomes even more challenging.

What am I talking about, you ask?

The nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for vice president has again pitted the “left-leaning media” against the “conservative right” in an unwinnable Donnybrook.

The social conservative wing of the Republican Party has rallied around Palin, joyously rejoicing in her pro-life, pro-gun values. Any criticism - or even tough questioning - is being labeled as unjustified attacks by the nasty media.

Up to this point, the unusual nature of the two candidates - John McCain’s role as a maverick in his party and Barack Obama’s quick rise from outside his party’s mainstream - have kept the culture wars largely hidden. Every news story wasn’t seen through a left vs. right prism.

Now, I’m afraid it will be impossible to write a news story or produce a TV news spot on Sarah Palin without worrying about whether it will be seen as “left-wing bias” by one side or “too soft because of fear of criticism” by the other side.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about Sarah Palin. And none of them have anything to do with her daughter or husband or former brother-in-law. They have to do with her views on the economy, on Iraq and Afghanistan, on health care and immigration. And with her credentials for making tough decisions when hotspots in the world flare up or when hurricanes strike or flood-waters rise.

Without the culture war stigma, perhaps we could get answers to some of those questions in the next two months.

 But if every question is questioned, if Mrs. Palin becomes more of a lightning rod than a serious candidate, she’ll still be a mystery on Nov. 4.

For another look at Palin and the culture wars: http://editor.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-wagging-dog-in-dodge-city.html#comment-form

Protecting sources is one of the fundamental principles of journalism.

My rule of thumb has always been, “Don’t allow a source to go off-the-record if you can help it, but if you agree to confidentiality, never break that pledge.”

Frankly, I hate “off-the-record” conversations. While sometimes necessary, they can be problematic in so many ways.

One of the most obvious problems faced Raleigh News and Observer Executive Editor John Drescher recently when he learned that John Edwards had lied to him about having an affair with a former staff member.

Do you still owe confidentiality to a source after you find out he lied to you?

Drescher ”outed” Sen. Edwards in a column when the affair became public knowledge. He broke his pledge of confidentiality.

Edwards had called Drescher last fall, shortly after the National Enquirer reported on the affair. In the phone call, Edwards denied the affair and asked Drescher to keep it out of the newspaper. The former presidential candidate even went so far as to mention his wife’s illness, suggesting that publishing the story would be bad for her health (she’s fighting cancer).

The News and Observer, as well as other papers in Edwards home state of North Carolina, have taken a load of criticism for not reporting more aggressively on the affair - even though the Enquirer’s original story was based on a single unnamed source.

No doubt Drescher was unhappy with Edwards. The senator’s behavior was unconscionable - on several fronts.

But was Drescher right to violate his “off-the-record” pledge to Edwards. Does it matter whether the source tells the truth or not?

Drescher defends his decision like this:

“I feel like ‘off-the-record’ is an unwritten contract where the source - and he’s the one who has to go off-the-record - says, “I have truth I want to tell you, but I have my reasons for not wanting to attach my name to it, so can we go off the record.” And I feel like that contract was broken in this case.”

True, Edwards broke his end of the deal. An implied part of any “off-the-record” agreement is that the source is providing accurate information.

But I’m not sure it’s fair to make the general statement that “off-the-record” agreements can be thrown out the window if the source is caught in a lie.

I can think of plenty of situations where a source’s original reason for needing confidentiality - worry about losing his job, or his life - would still be valid, even if it turns out the information was bad.

In this case, I can’t argue with Drescher’s decision. He didn’t owe Edwards anything.

But I wouldn’t necessarily favor a general standard that said a lie frees a journalist from the obligation to nonor a pledge of confidentiality. I think that’s going too far.

Notes: Thanks to Janet Mendler of MPA for pointing me to this story. A Q&A on this issue can be found on the ProPublic.org site: http://www.propublica.org/article/when-off-the-record-sources-lie-826/#When:12:30:00Z. Drescher’s column can be found
here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2711/story/1181346.html. 

I skyped for the first time last night.

That is, my wife and I used www.skype.com to talk to our son and his wife in New York - with a webcam on both computers providing the video link as well.

Talking on the phone will never be the same again.

Of course, video conferencing has been around a long time, and I’ve been in a number of business meetings that included video of the face behind the voice on the other end of the line.

But this is different.

This is talking to loved ones in the comfort of your home (and their home), seeing them and laughing with them - all on a free long-distance connection.

It beats the telephone - whether cell or land line - all to heck.

I remember when our son (the same one) first went off to college, 2,000 miles away at the University of Southern California, we would ask him to go stand next to the Tommy Trojan statue, where there was a live webcam, so we could see his face.

That was 1996, when he was a freshman in college. That’s how far webcams go back.

He’s come a long way since then - about 3,000 miles across the country, married, with a little girl and another on the way.

Now I can chat and interact with my son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter - and I don’t have to ask them to stand next to a statue.

I was thinking about what I should say about the Jesse Jackson/Barack Obama snafu when the New Yorker magazine cover came out.

Both are cases of media behaving poorly. Both are national stories that got little play in The Evening News. We’re a local newspaper that focuses on covering the Monroe County area. We print as much national and world news as we can in the space that’s left - and sometimes interesting stories like these get short shrift.

Both are interesting to me because they highlight issues that weren’t handled well by the media.

The first story involved the off-camera (he thought) remarks made by Rev. Jackson about Mr. Obama. A camera was running, and caught Rev. Jackson saying:

“See Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based. I wanna cut his nuts off. Barack, he’s been talking down to black people.”

When the story hit the mainstream media, the Associated Press and most newspapers decided not to report the actual text of the comment. The Associated Press story in The Evening News made two references - first to “a crude comment,” then calling it, “a slang reference to wanting to cut off Obama’s testicles.”

Like most readers, I immediately wanted to know what actually was said. It didn’t take long to find the video on the Internet. I thought it was going to be pretty vulgar. I couldn’t believe that “I wanna cut his nuts off…” was considered to be inappropriate for a general audience - especially since we’re talking about two very high profile people, one running for leader of the free world.

The biggest sin, I thought, was that the paraphrasing made it sound worse than the actual words. Roy Peter Clark, who writes for the Poynter Institute, said it better in this blog post on the subject. By not reporting the actual words, we (the media) deprived people of the chance to decide for themselves how grievous the offense was.

Now, along comes the New Yorker cover. An entirely different kind of mess.

The New Yorker is famous for satirical covers. This time they blew it big time.

In an effort to satirize the offensive stereotyping of Barack and Michelle Obama during the presidential race, the artist depicts Sen. Obama in a turban, giving a fist bump to his wife, who has an afro and is holding an AK-47 in an apparent attempt to portray her as a terrorist. The American flag burns in the fireplace behind the couple,and a picture of Osama bin Laden hangs on the wall.

I’m sure that New Yorker editors thought their sophisticated and liberal audience would appreciate the joke. Ha, ha.

The problem is that satire only works when it’s obviously satire. Too many Americans have believed the untruths that politically motivated rumormongers have spread about the Obamas. The magazine cover reinforces the very lies and hatred it attempts to satirize.

I’m the first to defend The New Yorker’s right to publish satire. I’m generally a fan of satire. But in this case, the stakes were too high and the attempt missed too badly. In a race that should be about issues and leadership and who has the best plan to move the country forward, this cover puts race and bigotry right back in the forefront.

Nice, try, New Yorker, but it didn’t work. The end result is likely to be the opposite of what you intended.

One of the regular users of MonroeTalks, “Kazimer,” challenged me to think about the connection between George Carlin, Tim Russert and MonroeTalks.

Kaz sent a link to a column by Rabbi Aaron Bergman on Detnews.com that made the loose link between Russert and Carlin, noting that they both “spoke truth to power.”

Neither backed down from challenging people in authority - in their own very different ways. Russert, as host of Meet the Press, was unfailingly polite and professional while asking tough questions and insisting on real answers. Carlin took pride in being rude and irreverent, both in his comedy and in his obversations on government, religion and any other institution.

What does all that have to do with MonroeTalks?

Kaz didn’t give his opinion, but I can see the direction he was heading with the question.

As the person primarily responsible for moderating MonroeTalks.com, I take a lot of grief from both sides when there is a controversial post that some think should be deleted.

Of course, I don’t make those decisions in a vacuum. They’re often discussed by several people before a decision is made. And of course, one of the underlying principles that we hold dear at The Evening News is freedom of speech. 

When it’s a close call, we’re usually going to err on the side of leaving it. That angers some people, who think we should be more aggressive in the name of decency. Like George Carlin’s comedy, some of the comments on MonroeTalks are pretty raunchy.

When does a person’s right to free speech get trumped by the public’s right to read a community discussion forum without being offended?

That’s not a question with an easy answer. We have “Terms of Service” for MonroeTalks - as well as for the comments that follow stories on monroenews.com - that prohibit profanity, obscenity and personal attacks, among other things. That helps, and we delete any clear violations. The problem is the huge gray area.

Rabbi Bergman ended his column with a plea that perhaps holds part of the answer.

“Politicians and religious leaders around the country are probably breathing a little easier, because Russert and Carlin will not be there anymore,” he wrote.

“It is up to all of us, in our own way, to continue to demand honesty and integrity from all in public life.”

MonroeTalks is a place where everyone can say what they want - in their own way. They can challenge people in authority, speaking their own version of “truth to power.” They also can tell jokes, swap recipes for potato salad, or banter about baseball.

And they can do it all like Russert, with class and respect, or like Carlin, with sharp and vulgar humor. 

My wife and I are thinking about getting a dog.

I’ve been negligent about blogging lately.

I’m following the growth of Twitter, wondering when and whether we should consider using it to help report the news in Monroe County.

Does all of this have any connection?

Only the tiniest thread.

I was reading the “E Media tidbits” blog on the Poynter Institute Web site this morning. It’s one of the ways I keep up with what’s going on in journalism new media circles.

There was a post by Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch.com, about how Twitter is occasionally turning off the reply function, because of traffic problems. Mr. Arrington noted that he just switches over to FriendFeed.com when that happens.

So I followed the link to see what that was about. This is how he started the conversation he used as an example:

“I keep thinking I should blog something, and then I look out at the ocean and go play with my dog instead.”

Note how short the message is. Typical of Twitter conversations.

Back to my story. That got me thinking about the dog my wife and I are considering. After 20 years of owning a dog, we’ve gone the last 10 or so without one. We’re thinking of getting back into the game.

The vision of walking the dog on the beach gets me thinking nostalgically about past walks with former pooches.

Which leads me to the fence I’ll need to build.

One more time-consuming project that will keep me from blogging.

This, of course, has been the $64,000 question in the newspaper industry for the past decade.

At The Evening News, we have seen huge increases in traffic to our Web sites, and a small reduction in the number of subscribers to the print edition.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that a few people are dropping readership of the newspaper because they get their local news online, but not many.

The available evidence seems to suggest, rather, that most people have developed new habits for using media of all kinds. They read the newspaper for certain kinds of information and entertainment, go to the Internet for other information and entertainment, and turn on the television or radio or any of the  many other sources for other select reasons.

A new study of Ohio readers suggests that’s exactly what’s happening.

The research, conducted by Belden Associates for the Ohio Newspaper Association, found that use of newspapers by readers remains strong, and that use of newspaper Web sites is growing. Now more than 80 percent of all people surveyed used one or the other to get their local news in the last week - far more than any other sources, such as television or radio.

Perhaps more important, more people said they were turning to both the newspaper Web site and the local newspaper than a year ago, while the majority said they were spending less time watching television, listening to the radio or reading magazines.

None of this means that newspapers are the news source of the future. That’s probably not the case.

But it suggests that for the time being people still are using both the print and on-line versions of the newspaper.

I just returned from a visit to our nation’s capitol (okay, I never really went to the capitol, just to suburban Virginia) , where I attended a seminar on interactive community journalism.

That’s a fancy term for what we do with MonroeTalks.com, our social networking site that is designed to give area residents a place to gather in local cyberspace.

I was there to talk about MonroeTalks.com - why we did it and how we manage it. The answer to the first question is obvious - because we saw a need and decided we’d better fill it before someone else did.

People are aching to connect with others and to be part of a community. With our society changing so rapidly, there’s much less sense of community in the old-fashioned sense. People sit at their computer (or in front of their television) instead of sitting on the front porch with their neighbors.

MonroeTalks.com provides an on-line environment for hanging over the back fence with your neighbors - figuratively speaking.

It’s a very different function than what we’ve traditionally filled at the Monroe Publishing Co. But I suspect it’s only one of many we’ll fill in the future, as our media world changes.

I was struck by one comment by the seminar moderator, Mary Glick of the American Press Institute.

Some of the seminar members were questioning taking newsroom resources away from covering the “news of record” in their towns - like city or county agencies - so they could cover emerging new topics.

Mary said something like this:

“Keep in mind that in our society the locus of power is shifting away from government – to the people. A case in point: Our country is at war, but not with another government – with terrorists – a group of people.”

She didn’t continue to make the obvious next point - that the locus of “information” power also is shifting from our monolithic newspapers of yore to a very pluralistic future with many news voices.

So as journalists we’re living with two shifts – the geopolitical power shifting to the people – necessitating our re-thinking how we cover government in a democracy – at the same time the information power base is shifting to the people - any of whom can start their own blog and/or Web site.

The two shifts are most certainly related.

Anyone can report on city or county or state government on their own blog, on their own Web site. Readers have many, many potential places to look for information. That makes community activists more powerful, and it makes both government and the traditional press less powerful.

We still plan to make the Monroe Evening News the best source of local news and information for many, many years. That’s still our primary focus.

But in the meantime, www.monroenews.com and www.MonroeTalks.com, as well as www.HomesPlusMonroe.com and www.MonroeParent.com and www.Letstalktigers.com are just the beginning of the online sources of information we’ll be providing.

We’re in a race to continue to be Monroe County’s primary source of information - where ever you want to find it.

My jaw dropped.

Noticeably, like when your mouth hangs open a little further than is polite.

A colleague had pointed out the four-column lead photo in the Toledo Blade this morning. There, front and center, was Blade Co-Publisher John Robinson Block, shaking hands with Barack Obama.

Obama’s photo belonged on the front page of The Blade. He spoke to an overflow crowd of 10,000 Sunday at the University of Toledo; another 5,000 were turned away. His visit was clearly the top news of the day.

But what was the newspaper publisher doing on the front page? I was shocked. As a journalist, I was embarrassed for The Blade and the editors who work there.

Journalists ought to be doing everything in their power to keep from getting entangled in the news. It’s our job to report, not to participate.

In The Blade’s defense, Mr. Obama did meet with the newspaper’s editorial board, and it’s certainly appropriate to report what he said to the newspaper’s editors. There’s nothing wrong with a photo of Mr. Obama visiting The Blade.

But which photo do you lead the front page with - Mr. Obama speaking to 10,000 people, or shaking the publisher’s hand.

There may not be another serious newspaper in the country that would have used the photo of the publisher on Page 1.

The first word that came to mind was tawdry. Next was arrogant.

Surely editors of The Blade would not have used that photograph unless they were ordered to by the publisher - the man in the picture. Does he really think that much of himself, to believe that a visiting presidential candidate shaking hands with him was the top news of the day?

What was he thinking?