1) The biggest news in Rhode Island today (in my opinion) is the fact that Deepwater Wind is moving its headquarters to Providence. Linked is the Projo story, which covers only today's announcement, but a press release from the governor's office says the company has pledged $1.5 billion to develop the wind power industry in Rhode Island, including opening a manufacturing facility in Quonset and bringing approximately 800 new jobs to the state. If even half of that investment comes to fruition, it will be huge for the future of Rhode Island's economy. Today is a good day for Rhody wind power.
2) CJR has an impressively passionate (for them) takedown of Forbes' recent article on "How Obama Thinks." If you click only one of those links, make it the CJR one. The original article isn't worth your time. It's basically five pages of speculation, insinuation, and misrepresentation presented as fact-based analysis. There are facts in the article, but by the time you've separated them from all the bullshit surrounding them, they cease to have any real value to the author's argument. This isn't a politically motivated criticism; I don't really care if author Dinesh D'Souza thinks Obama is the most anti-business president in American history. My problem is a journalistic one: Forbes should know better than to devote a cover story to what reads more like the rantings of a political ideologue (which D'Souza certainly is) than a well-reasoned critique of the president's policies.
3) A much more intelligent and nuanced magazine cover-story comes from this week's New York Magazine. Chris Smith's profile of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show focuses on the absurdity of the "media-political complex" and the way Stewart and co. have grown into their role as a counterpoint to it. I very rarely read long (more than a page or two) pieces online, but I stuck with this one all the way to the end, and didn't even realize what I was doing.
4) Finally, the Pew research center published an extensive study on media consumption which you can read about here. Some of the information is interesting, a lot of it is dreadfully boring, and attempting to draw conclusions from it is always dangerous. The headline that brought me to the study came from Romenesko, which touted this interesting tidbit: Americans reported spending the same amount of time consuming news in print, on radio, and on TV combined as they did in 2000 (a whopping 57 minutes). Our consumption across those media has remained unchanged for 10 years. But this year, respondents reported an additional 13 minutes of news consumption online, bringing our total up to 70 minutes of news a day. Does this mean the public is more informed now than in 2000 (when online news consumption was negligible as a percentage of the total)? Not necessarily. But spending more time consuming news from more sources can't be a bad thing.
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