www.roanoke.com

Tomorrow we'll also laud the life of Frank Batten Sr., founder of this newspaper's parent company, who died early today at age 82.

Bloggers have been so busy patting themselves on the back as the replacement for newspapers that they forgot one important thing: They need money.

Declining ad revenue at newspapers is no secret, but the self-declared replacements aren't raking in ad dollars either.

Several prominent, liberal bloggers recently complained to a Washington Post writer that the big Democratic spenders aren't buying enough ads or offering enough fellowships.

Turns out the new media is just as vulnerable as the old media to the myth that producing the news is free. Welcome to the club.

Some people hate what they call the "mainstream media." Take that as a given. They especially hate newspapers.  They cheer declining circulation figures and newspapers shutting down.  Many of them figure new sources of local news online will pick up the slack and deliver the content they need.

According to economists at Princeton University, those people should be careful what they wish for. When newspapers close, Democracy takes a hit.

The duo studied the fallout from the closing of The Cincinnati Post on New Year's Eve 2007. They found that:

The closing of the Post reduced the number of people voting in elections and the number of candidates for city council, city commission and school board in the Kentucky suburbs, and raised incumbent council and commission members' chances of keeping their jobs.

In other words, without the newspaper acting as watchdog and providing information about local politics, citizens were less involved and those in power more easily held onto it.

For those who think blogs and television can replace newspapers, the report looked at that, too:

Although competing publications or other media such as TV, radio and blogs may take up some slack when a newspaper closes, none of these appears so far to have fully filled the Post's role in municipal politics in norther Kentucky.

Read their report.

Hat tip to Reflections of a Newsosaur blog for pointing out the report.

Back during the presidential campaign last year, the Web site PolitiFact (a project of the Saint Petersburg Times) did an admirable job of keeping the candidates honest. OK, maybe it didn't keep them honest, but at least it helped Americans sort truth from lies.

Just because the election is over and the new president is in office doesn't mean the politicians have stopped lying. The site continues to analyze public statements.

It also is tracking whether President Obama keeps 510 promises he made on the campaign trail.  So far, he hasn't taken action one way or the other on most of them, but some are already fulfilled, broken, compromised, stalled or in the works.

For example, he broke his promise to allow five days of public comment on bills before signing them. Meanwhile, he fulfilled his promise to ban lobbyist gifts to executive employees. (Check out all the rest by clicking on the graphic above.)

I'm glad to see that they remain vigilant. They need to update their theme song, though.

There are a couple of bills before the General Assembly that would change the way local government communicates with the people. I'm curious what readers think.

Right now, when a local government wants to hold a meeting, say a Roanoke City Council meeting, it must advertise the agenda in the newspaper of general circulation in the area. That's a state requirement, and the idea is that it's the best way to let the most people know what their government is doing. It also allows people to know when and where meetings are so they might attend.

House Bill 2355 and House Bill 1879 would lift that requirement. Instead, localities could advertise their meetings and agendas on their own Web sites, on public access radio or television, by text message or e-mail, or other means. (Check out the two individual bills for specifics.) Nothing, of course, prevents governments from using those mechanisms now, but they must use the newspaper. Read more »

Credit where credit is due. The Collegiate Times (the newspaper at Virginia Tech) broke the university's silence wide open.

The families of victims of the April 16, 2007 shootings received access to 7,600 records related to the incident this week. The school intended to keep the records from the general public until February.

The Collegiate Times did not want everyone to wait and saw no justification for withholding public records. The paper put many of them online today.

What does one learn at the ultra-Christian, right-wing Regent University law school?

If you're disgraced Justice Department employee Monica Goodling, you learn that fealty to Republican causes, Jesus and George W. Bush are more important than the rule of law and justice.

If you're Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, you learn that the First Amendment isn't worth squat if it stands in the way of holding water for a radically conservative agenda.

The latest move by the likely Republican gubernatorial nominee to squelch freedom came this week. McDonnell's office appealed a federal court decision that a state law forbidding college newspapers from accepting ads for alcohol is unconstitutional. The decision also overturned limits on what content is permissible in such ads at any newspaper, not just college ones. The law had banned words like "bar" and "happy hour."

The original lawsuit challenging the law was brought by the parent company of Virginia Tech's The Collegiate Times and the University of Virginia's The Cavalier Daily. (We wrote about it here.)

Once again, McDonnell chooses to appease his base rather than seek to uphold Constitutional rights.

During the appeal, the original ruling stands. Students returning to Blacksburg and Charlottesville this weekend should tip one back for the AG. Check your campus paper for good ideas about where to do it.

For everyone concerned about the media coverage of the shootings at Virginia Tech, The Project for Excellence in Journalism has tabulated how much coverage there was last week. The worst offenders, as you might guess, were television news, especially cable news.

As promised in another thread, here are pdfs of the recent feature we did introducing the editorial page staff and explaining the pages.

I'll try to get them in a more permanent location, as well.

Meet the staff

A guide to our daily pages

A letter in today's paper (click here, then scroll to the bottom) takes us to task for running an editorial cartoon one day criticizing Hillary for flip-flopping on Iraq after running a cartoon the week before criticizing President Bush for not being responsive to public sentiment on the war.

"I was always taught that 'what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,' meaning that we must be consistent in our beliefs. Apparently, The Times does not hold to this tenet," wrote Pete Hamilton.

I've got two responses to that: First, cartoons are signed work, and like all signed work on our pages represent the individual opinion of the person signing them, not the institutional viewpoint of The Roanoke Times. We probably need to do a better job educating readers about that distinction, but there should be no expectation that cartoons by different authors will express consistent viewpoints.

Second, there is a difference between flip-flopping based on polls - which is what Clinton was accused of in the Jim Morin cartoon - and recognizing that there has been a fundamental shift in national opinion and that the vast majority of the nation no longer supports a failed course of action, which is what the Daryl Cagle cartoon dinged the president for his failure to do.