Thanks, Alaska

Strange occurrences and aberrant behavior are a two-edged sword for journalists.

Swung one way, they make for some pretty interesting reading. Swung the other, they reflect poorly on the place you live.

For quite some time now, Floridians have had to duck as that sword has swung back. From the 2000 presidential election to legislative efforts to revive the brain-dead Terry Schiavo to all manner of stupid acts -- criminal and otherwise -- the Sunshine State has been a gold mine for late-night comedians.

So it is with both relief and amusement that Floridians now look diagonally across the country to their brethren in Alaska and say, "Your turn."

Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens were a good start, but now we have Eileen Goode, who hailed from Massachusetts but who hit the big time in a small town in the Northwest. As Kyle Hopkins reported Monday in the Anchorage Daily News, Goode lost her job as news director at KDLG, a school-district-owned public-radio station in Dillingham.

It wasn't what the 28-year-old said over the airwaves but rather what she wrote in Chilly Hell, her blog about life in her adopted home town, that cooled her employer to her promise as a journalist. Some examples:

• She wrote, "I love living in a place where I can be treated as a respectable personage simply by dint of being sober, employed and totally uninterested in having sex with relatives or children."
• She described Dillingham as home to "passing drunk women around like poorly rolled joints."
• She discussed the death of a woman who was found outside, freezing and wondered, "Is it too much to ask for people to die tragically?"

That may have earned her a cold shoulder from Alaskans, but she took a lot of heat off Floridians.

Is Twitter reviving news?

With Jay Leno's departure from The Tonight Show on NBC, the scramble for his late-night television audience is on -- and, according to Bill Carter of The New York Times, it looks as though some of that may be going to news.

News? What's that?

It's the stuff they have on ABC's Nightline, the news magazine born of the Iran hostage crisis during the Carter Administration and anchored ably for so long by Ted Koppel. As good as he was, Koppel was never quite as funny Leno or David Letterman of CBS's Late Show.

Entertainment seems to trump information nearly every time. When the information concerns entertainment, though, the door opens a crack, and that's what happened with the death of singer Michael Jackson.

Nightline capitalized on the connection of one of its anchors, Martin Bashir, who had conducted a memorable interview with the pop star. It also capitalized on the social network Twitter, where 800,000 people now follow the show.

Won't it be interesting if Michael Jackson ends up moonwalking the public back to being engaged with what's going on in their world.

First Dance

Weddings can send signals about the happy couples involved.

Formal affairs connote conformist attitudes -- of either the bride and groom or their parents. Unusual venues -- outdoors, on bungee platforms, underwater -- imply various degrees of the opposite.

Jillian Peterson and Kevin Heinz felt the urge to get in step with the times -- and ended up inviting a larger-than-usual number of surprised guests to their St. Paul, Minnesota, wedding. The video of them and their wedding party boogieing down the aisle had been seen more than 1.7 million times on YouTube before it was taken down for copyright reasons.

They then recreated the performance, to Chris Brown's "Forever," Friday on NBC's Today show.

Check it out, and feel free to join in.

Don't Friend Him

Is your BlackBerry going off at all hours of the day and night?

Is your e-mail stuffed with tweets and friend requests?

Jonathan Abrams has had enough of that -- which is ironic, because he started it all.

In an article in The Chicago Tribune, Mark Milian tells us that Abrams, who founded Friendster -- the forerunner of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter -- in 2003, wants no more. Having envisioned Friendster as a means of connecting with close friends, Abrams found that it grew far beyond that.

"I'm a little burned out," he admitted to Milian. He even has banned his girlfriend from checkng her BlackBerry in the bedroom.

Now he uses Facesbook and Twitter for promotion rather than communicating with friends.

Could that happen to us? Once we've moved our social network online, will we grow sick of it, as Abrams has?

Could this be the end of friendship?

Sophomores come out to play

Granted: We don't read the sports pages of newspapers to be informed about consequential happenings; we read them to be entertained. They're part of the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine of "hard news" go down.

Do we read them, though, to see how adorably headline writers can distort athletes' names to make them appear to have something to do with whatever sport is being covered?

Maybe we do. And then, if we study hard, we move on to our junior year of high school.

When Stewart Cink won the British Open golf tournament Sunday by defeating 59-year-old Tom Watson, though, we knew what was coming. Across the front of the local sports section: "Cink-ing feeling."

Groan.

This is in a state where the chief financial officer's last name is Sink, but you don't see "Sinking feeling" in any headlines on the news pages about the state's fiscal misfortunes. I wonder why.

While we're on golf: How does an activity in which a near-sexagenarian comes in second in a top event (a then-53-year-old, Greg Norman, came in third last year) qualify as a sport?

Doesn't "sport" imply exertion, perspiration, perhaps?

Maybe "game" is the word we're looking for -- like checkers or old maid.

Farewell, Walter

Walter Cronkite, found by public-opinion polls during his 19-year tenure as anchorman of the CBS Evening News to be "the most trusted man in America," has died at age 92.

During an age when people discovered that they didn't necessarily have to wait until the next morning's newspaper to find out what was happening, they came to rely on the grandfatherly Cronkite to bring them the truth.

He was there to tell us about some of the most tumultuous, devastating and uplifting events of the past century -- the Vietnam war, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, man's landing on the moon.

It wasn't the news he reported, though, that distinguished Cronkite but rather his credibility. We believed every word he said -- and with good reason. He was an honorable man and one we shall miss.

And that's the way it is.

An intriguing proposal

Way back when putting newspaper content on the Internet was a new idea, visionaries decided that they could establish their publications as the go-to sources for all information in their communities by making it available for free.

I wonder if General Motors ever considered giving away the cars it builds -- and how much longer the company could have staved off bankruptcy by following the same shrewd strategy.

Now, with newsrooms across America continuing to shove free news onto a medium they haven't figured out how to make pay, David Simon has an intriguing, albeit risky, proposal in the current Columbia Journalism Review. He calls upon the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post to start charging everyone who doesn't subscribe to the print papers to read them online.

There's something about this that feels like the periodic efforts to end the reliance on anonymous sources in the nation's capital. It could work only if everyone involved agrees to do it -- which never happens.

The same is true here. If either paper balks, the other would suffer greatly. On the other hand, if both go along -- and, perhaps, are joined by other large news organizations -- they just might be able to breathe some life back into America's newsrooms.