Try it on 

Mark Glaser interviews the Wall Street Journal's managing editor about the paper's increasing willingness to try online modes.

Check out the Build Method, about a third of the way down the page, a new model for wire, online and print reporters to evolve a news story. That's the joy and the PITA of online stuff isn't it? The fact that it's never put to bed?

Also new to me, a WSJ blog on work-family balance started earlier this month: Juggle.

Comments on Glaser's piece reference a WSJ assistant editor's opinion published on Wednesday that bloggers are fools and their readers imbeciles. Clearly not all staff is on board. Anyone have an idea what this guy's story is? I'd be curious to know what generation he belongs to, and how it happens that a thinking person these days could rationally choose to fight the revolution.

I agree with the stick-up-his-butt guy (Rago, the assistant editor) about one aspect of political blogs when he says, "The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren't." And here's my opinion about it right now: if blogs are going to make a difference in the 2008 presidential election, political bloggers are going to have to do something about the prevailing rant form.

A rant brings out readers and commenters in sympathy with the blogger's stance, and those in diametric opposition, but I don't see that it does anything to persuade a waffler, and that's where the power is, the sweet spot.

Talmudic take on Steve Gillmor 

Joel Spolsky deconstructs the latest GestureLab post.

I take shots at Steve's cryptic ways, too, but I love his writing, and in some way that's hard to describe, I get his drifts on some meta level of reading that transcends looking at one word after the other. Maybe it's the Kabalistic way of doing Gillmor.

P.S. Did Spolsky miss the pop culture references -- Harvey and Yogi Bear -- or did he file them beneath his notice?

Dynastic America: 'Two prohibitively weird families' 

Joe Klein on Hillary's run:

"In 2008, when she runs for president, we will have had people named Bush and Clinton as presidents of the United States for the last 20 consecutive years. And so the major question is: Do the American people want to keep on trading their most precious office back and forth between these two prohibitively weird families?"

Well, maybe! I was really looking for something said on the following week's Chris Matthews Show, about how voters may be more ready for a Black president than a woman president. Do you think that's true? What is it about us that we can't stomach the idea, while citizens in England, Israel and India haven't seemed to have a problem with it?

How they picked You 

A CNN show documented the Time magazine Person of the Year selection process. It will be shown again tomorrow at 6 a.m. and 2 p.m Eastern. The Time editors seem more aware that the MSM has lost influence than some online commentators on the pick have supposed.