The Candidate Who's Always On

Chuck Olsen, a Minnesota freelancer paid for his work by Rocketboom and the campaign, writes on his blog: "For what it's worth I'm convinced Edwards is a passionate, smart, authentic person who would make a great president."

Robert Scoble, a blogger and former Microsoft staffer, paid his own way -- except for the flights on the Edwards campaign plane during the multi-city announcement tour that began in New Orleans. "Was I used by the campaign? Absolutely," he writes on his blog. "I was there to give a different look at the campaign than the Washington Post or CNN could give." Responding to criticism by another blogger who accused him of "doing exactly what his handlers wanted, namely, giving Edwards pseudo-legitimacy among the technophile idiots," Scoble says: "I got to know his staff instead of trying to ask a question that'd get Edwards angry or give me an answer that he wouldn't give Matt Lauer on the 'Today' show."

Small is Beautiful?

The slimmed-down Wall Street Journal looked colorful but cramped last week after debuting at its reduced size, with a huge "What's News" digest and a display ad squeezing the front-page stories into three remaining columns. But the more important development has nothing to do with the money-saving layout.

"The culture here has changed dramatically in the last few years," says Managing Editor Paul Steiger. He says 80 percent of the paper's articles will now stress analysis, interpretation or feature writing, with only 20 percent of the what-happened-yesterday variety. As if to underscore the shift, the lead of Thursday's paper was an opinion column by Alan Murray, saying that the CEO of Home Depot had "failed most spectacularly" as a public spokesman. The news story on Robert Nardelli's resignation and $210-million golden parachute ran to the column's left.

The late Journal editor Barney Kilgore once said that "it doesn't have to happen yesterday to be news," Publisher Gordon Crovitz recalls. "To which I'd add, just because it happened yesterday, it may not be news to our readers."

Steiger says he assumes that most readers, though not all, have already seen the day's news online. The paper plans to break most of its exclusives on its subscription-only Web site, which has 800,000 customers. When the Journal learned that Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet would resign rather than make corporate-mandated budget cuts, it put the story online -- prompting Baquet to confirm the news to his staff -- and came back with a more detailed piece the next morning.

As for the smaller paper's 5 percent loss of news space, Steiger insists tighter editing (plus info-graphics in the USA Today mold) will make up the difference.

Some Journal staffers, meanwhile, are quite upset over an incident last month in which advertisers were told in advance that the paper planned a story on jets that rent time to clients, allowing the handful of companies in the field to buy ad space in the Personal Journal section.

Insiders say that Hilary Stout, the section's editor, objected to the advertisers' involvement and declined to assign the story, and that travel columnist Scott McCartney refused the assignment after a jet company called him to ask about the story. Another reporter was drafted and wrote a balanced piece.

Steiger says the story -- which was first noted by Women's Wear Daily -- was "much too narrow" for advertisers to have been notified in advance, as opposed to a story or package on a larger industry. Such arrangements, he says, could "create confusion and make people think the story might be an advertorial . . . I'm glad that some reporters raised questions about it." He says the paper will be "more diligent" about what it tells advertisers in advance.

Plagiarism Watch

Jacqueline Gonzalez, a San Antonio Express-News columnist, resigned last week after editors found her lifting information without credit in three columns. An internal inquiry began after Gonzalez was found to have ripped off the online encyclopedia Wikipedia for material on the origin of Dec. 25 as the observed birth date of Jesus Christ.

Hollywood on the Potomac

Washington journalists must be getting famous. In a "tribute" to the 110th Congress sponsored by the Creative Coalition, the "celebrity delegation" touted in the invitation includes not just Heather Graham, Morgan Fairchild, Fran Drescher and Rip Torn, but Newsweek's Howard Fineman, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson and CNN's Bob Franken. The Jan. 31 event is a $1,000-a-ticket fundraiser for the lobbying group.