Here's a copy of my LTTE to the WaPo ombudswoman in response to her unfortunate  column. (She could give former NYT public editor Daniel Okrent a run for his money as the most irrelevant and dysfunctional ombudsman of the year.

TO THE OMBUDSWOMAN,

I've frequently wondered why the Washington Post website carried articles and information that reflected a generally deeper enthusiasm  for investigating  current events and a far more developed perspective within which to communicate the results of those investigations  and analyses to the public than the print version of the Post does.

Thanks to your column today I understand that the primary reason for this seems to be that the Post website is not directly managed by the mandarins in the Post's print version's editorial process.

I'm sorry to see the print edition of the Post falling away from it's potential this way. As a former longtime resident of the Washington area I remember when the Post was a truly great paper.

It's always sad to see greatness erode, especially when the tools that might help restore it lie within reach.

Sincerely,

I realize the first sentence is especially clunky but I didn't have the enthusiasm to really try to fix it because in all the years I've been writing letters to the editor, WaPo is one of the only really major papers in the country to never print one.

Denial is our most dangerous adversary.

read this diary. It is going into the margins and diaries on the right side of the page. Dennis Prager is an Asshole.

You're dissing one of my heroes. Debbie Howell was my high school journalism teacher. She was a reporter for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times then and taught just the one course at my high school. She was probably 24 or 25 years old at the time. This was Texas in the mid-60's. The only career advice I ever got was - you have to be a secretary - it's the only decent job for a woman. What else are you going to do? Teach school? No pay, no respect, you'll end up an old maid school teacher. Or be a nurse? Yuck - disgusting things with sick people.

And into this world stepped a real life Lois Lane. I had no idea women could even be reporters outside of a comic book. She was one of the "cool teachers" - smart and funny and energetic. When the violence and abuse got too bad one night at my house, she took me in and found me a safe place to stay.

I read her column and I'm not seeing an attack or anything like it on Froomkin. She's just explaining the difference between WaPo print paper, and the .com and reporting some of the tensions between them.  She never says she doesn't like him - she's just telling us that some of the political reporters in the newsroom don't.

She does think that the title of his column should be changed, because it give the impression that he is a White House reporter - which he's not. From her column:

Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular . . . . Froomkin said he is "happy to consider other ways to telegraph to people that I'm not a Post White House reporter. I do think that what I'm doing, namely scrutinizing the White House's every move -- with an attitude -- is in the best traditions of American and Washington Post journalism.""

So she says that Froomkin is "highly opinionated and liberal." This is some kind of insult? Seems to me like that's just a fact.

And she was the one who described Woodward thusly:

While Woodward is listed as an assistant managing editor, he has no management duties. He comes and goes as he pleases, mostly writing his best-selling books on what happens behind the doors of power, and he reports only to Executive Editor Len Downie. He is allowed to keep juicy stories to himself until his latest book is unveiled on the front page of The Post. He is the master of the anonymous source.

[Damn - no link, but it's from a comment of mine when I was reading that column of hers.]

I think she's getting a bum rap here. Cranky. Sheesh. Here's one of the women who really inspired me to think I could break out of the rigid female roles that were being force fed to me . . . and now she's just a "cranky lady." It's making me cranky.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. -Edmund Burke

Great diary, lots of useful stuff and raised a ? for me. Not sure if comments is the place to start but where do people get their news from? A news aggregator like Google or a bunch o blogs or? Reply with links, so we can check them out.

"Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future."

I've always admired her writing. I haven't read the column in question yet, but on a gut-level, I fear she may be right -- in our current "national security"/"war on terror" mode, there are quite a few folks (of both genders) that still see women as not being built of the Right Stuff to be leaders, Golde Meir and Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding. I honestly wouldn't mind seeing a woman as Vice President first anyway -- it's been over 20 years since Mondale had the cojones to put Ferraro's name in the slot as his running mate. It turned out to be a flawed choice, but because of her (and her spouse's) baggage, not her gender.

Note to Phil in Maine: I usually skim the headlines using the RSS reader built into Safari (Mac OS X); it comes with several built-in RSS sources and it's easy to add others. (Someone more familiar with RSS can maybe suggest ones for other browsers -- I know that the Sage extension for Firefox is pretty good...)

I'm gonna tell all you fascists, you may be surprised People all over this world are getting organized -- Wilco