They're trying to wash us away
Surfing the critics:
- With New Orleans teetering on the verge of complete collapse, my friend and colleague, Dave Walker, TV critic at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, has evacuated with a half-million other locals. From near Baton Rouge, he's observing what will likely become the country's first sustained mass experiment in webcasting. Some local TV stations cannot broadcast because their towers are down, but even those still on the air must use the Web to reach viewers who will be living outside the area for the next three to four months. Dave's report is on page A-12 of today's Web-only edition of the Times-Picayune, itself an involuntary test of Web journalism.
- Earlier, my counterpart at the Miami Herald, the irascible Glenn Garvin, had to put up with flooding and power outages in South Florida as Katrina whizzed through there. He writes about that and asks the question: Is it me or are we getting more of these every year? (Your kansascity.com ID will work there.)
- Tim Goodman is back from vacation. I've got to take me one of those.
- Gail Pennington in St. Louis -- home of Missouri's only Major League Baseball team -- notes a fact that might otherwise have slipped our minds amidst the deluge of real news: Martha Stewart gets her anklet off today.
- And Lisa de Lectable is back from her post-TCA break as well, with a ratings rundown that all fans of scripted TV and reality hatahs should enjoy. Even I learned something: HBO really does care about the ratings.
