Redefining “Christian” music

Interesting article mentioned on the site of some of my favorite conservatives:

CCM (formerly Contemporary Christian Music magazine) is going to start covering music on non-religious labels. Considering that some of the best Christian artists despise Christian music labels (take Sam "Leslie" Phillips as an example), this move should have happened years ago. As Phillips' husband, T-Bone Burnett, once put it: "You can sing about the Light, or you can sing about what you see because of the Light. I prefer the latter."

Anyway, from CCM:

“We’re going to start mixing indie and general market Christians such as The Fray, Mary J. Blige and Sufjan Stevens in with artists with traditional Christian label affiliation. Rather than define ‘Christian music’ just by its label or distribution, we’re now defining it as Christian worldview music. CCM Magazine has always taken its role as a leader seriously, and we believe this is the way of the future.”

Or as David Byrne would say, "Same as it ever was." Or at least "should have been."

Source: CCM, via Christian Realism

Journalism-is-doomed roundup

• Timothy J. McNulty on why local journalism can't be outsourced.
  
  Unlike most of my colleagues, I think PasedenaNow's experiment is actually pretty interesting, if only for forcing journalists to ponder the value they bring to readers and what makes journalism different from, say, PR.
  
  But I agree that PasedenaNow's effort will fail badly. And it suggests that the editor there doesn't understand his own profession.
  
  
• The San Francisco Chronicle is cutting 100 newsroom jobs, or 25% of its news staff. Ouch.
  
  
• Susan Goldberg, Andrea's now-departed boss, addresses both of the above-mentioned points, at least obliquely, in an interview for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.
  
  Notable quotables:
  "As painful as any kind of cutting can be, the upside is that it does force you to focus on your priorities. ... You really need to think long and hard about what makes you special in your marketplace. In San Jose, one of the things that made us special was our technology coverage. So, if that's at the top of the heap, than maybe something else falls off the bottom so you can keep doing technology coverage incredibly well. So in Cleveland, perhaps that would be coverage of the growth industry here -- the medical industry."
  
  "Whiny people who live in the past, they drive me crazy. Because, there's nothing we can do about the massive changes in our industry. ... Just whining and moaning about the way it used to be will not solve anything. ... I find as time goes on and our problems become more and more apparent, and our need to change becomes more and more apparent, my patience for 'whiny people who live in the past' becomes shorter."

Google: better and better

Not to sound like a fanboy or anything, but it's now officially easier to find a library book on Google (well, WorldCat through Google, actually) than on my library's own Web site.

Switching hosts

I'm moving the blog portion of this site over to Blogspot. This should result in better performance (and more flexibility with photos), but I may run into some transitional issues.

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What does it take to get fired from this administration?

Apparently, nothing short of losing a war or an American city.

From the Washington Post:

The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.

The department's affirmation of Gonzales's remarks raised fresh questions about the nature of the classified dispute, which former U.S. officials say led then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and as many as eight colleagues to discuss resigning.

I think it's about time for Congress to exercise its constitutional prerogative and impeach the lying SOB.

P.S. I just realized that "lying SOB" could apply to any number of people in the White House. In this case, I mean Gonzales.

Interactive guide to Republican scandals

Just in case you have trouble keeping up -- and who doesn't? -- Slate has a handy interactive feature. Unfortunately, it doesn't cover instances of the administration's staggering incompetence, just those that justify impeachment and/or jail time. 

Source: Slate Magazine

Shopping for Europe

Actually, this is mostly a test to see whether blogging in Europe is practical through the phone.