Stubborn Kind of Fellow

Between the holiday, travel and the crud that's going around both my office and back in Wisconsin, it's been tough to get back to posting the past few days. So what do you do when the world keeps moving even when you can't? Easy – slow it down with a few bullets.

• Not surprisingly, there was a fair amount of chatter in the blogosphere in response to Paul Mulshine's anti-blogger cri de coeur over the fate of newspapers that appeared over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal. Mulshine writes for the Newark Star-Ledger and is one of the more iconoclastic columnists around; I may be the only person who thinks this way, but he occupies space in my mental filing cabinet with Ruben Navarette and Steve Chapman, since all three of them are sensible on some issues and nuts on others. I'm not offended that Mulshine doesn't think much of bloggers, because in the main he's right. There's a reason why most bloggers have a blogroll. Anyone who is honest knows that the majority of blogs out there aren't worth your time. It's work to find the good ones. I'm sure it galls a guy like Mulshine that his industry is dying in the face of competitors that he couldn't have even imagined when he began working in the newspaper business 900 years ago. Mulshine and his colleagues are on the business end of Schumpeter these days. It can't be pleasant.
• Which brings us to the news that long-time Twin Cities sports columnist Patrick Reusse will be the new morning man over at KSTP, paired with the eternally vanilla Jay Kolls, whose career conclusively demonstrates the importance of marrying well. Our astute friend Brad Carlson has a good writeup on the topic. It's a gamble for both Reusse and KSTP to do this, but it's pretty obvious that Reusse's main employer is circling the drain right now. Might as well try something new while you can. Reusse is a lefty but he's very funny and my guess is that he'll find quickly that he'll do better with humor than polemics. I wish him well and suspect that he'll be a big improvement over Willie Clark, the guy that KSTP ashcanned.
• Christmas was a lot of fun and it's always good to get home to lovely Appleton. Since I wasn't feeling well, I didn't get out and about much during the time I was there, but you can see that the Fox River Valley continues to thrive. There's a vast, Woodburyesque shopping area on the southeast side of town that has developed in the last 5 years. The stores are all thriving, too. Appleton's main industry has always been papermaking; while there might not be as much newsprint being sold these days and a huge mill in nearby Kimberly recently closed, my hometown looks to be pretty prosperous these days.