The Press's Post-Iowa Tailwinds: As Nature Intended It?

"I know I made a mistake," Simpson told the Boston Globe, adding: "But I'd really like to see her win. After being a reporter for so many years, where you wish you could do more than you can, it would be nice to make a difference."

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¿ Dan Miller, business editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, wants journalists to "keep an open mind" on global warming.

Miller says so in a letter to journalists on behalf of the Heartland Institute, which says it champions "free-market solutions" and features on its Web site a picture of Al Gore headlined "Global Warming Snowjob."

Enclosed in the mailing are a pair of DVDs -- one of them Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the other titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." Neither the Sun-Times nor Miller, a former institute staffer, responded to requests for comment.

After the Chicago Tribune reported the mailing, institute President Joseph Bast criticized the story in an e-mail to subscribers, saying: "The dual DVD set fairly represents both sides of the debate and encourages viewers to make up their own minds."

¿ An ex-congressman is arrested for driving drunk and, it turns out, a 24-year-old woman was on his lap. Sounds like an irresistible story. But the Albany Times Union refused to report the name of the woman who was with former representative John Sweeney (R-N.Y.) because she is a "private citizen."

"We concluded pretty quickly that information wasn't newsworthy and it wouldn't be published in our pages," Editor Rex Smith wrote. "A lot of people figure that in the age of the Internet, there's no place for the sort of editorial judgment our decision represents. . . . People say the era of the editor as gatekeeper of the news is over.

"Well, fine. Knock yourselves out on Google, folks."