The Golden Report for Saturday January 23

I'm glad I'm not alone in this. At the recommendation of a friend who I follow on Google Reader, I am now subscribed to the feed of Ezra Klein, the young Washington Post blogger who has covered the health care story better than any other journalist. One of his posts was titled "Tab Dump"-- which is the simplest yet best definition for this phenomena (some may call it a syndrome). I started posting these intermediate "Golden Report for --Date-" blog entries for the purposing of tab dumping. What is that? Over the course of a day, a lot of links pass through Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, RSS feeds and other articles. Many times, I will click on them and spend about 5 seconds glancing at the page then go back to what I was doing, thinking that I will return to the page later. Sometimes I do but, more often than not, especially with news articles, that doesn't happen for several days, if ever. I blame Twitter and its client TweetDeck for this. If I see a tweet of interest, I'll click the link so that I don't have to search for it later. What happens is that my computer screen looks like it did on Thursday of this week: with 14 windows open, some with 10-15 tabs. Anyway, as I said, I'm glad that I'm not alone in this. So, today's tab dump, which I classily describe under a more sophisticated title:

Washington Post/Thursday: "Health care debate delayed action on other big issues" -- the biggest political story of the week (besides a certain special election in Massachusetts) was the uncertainty around the Congressional agenda, specifically the future of health care reform. Did it die this week? Probably not. Is the future path clear? Far from it. And there a lot of other issues for Congress to deal with, that they had been delaying, and that will be all the more difficult now with 59 votes in the Senate.

TIME, "A Mixed Record in a Crisis-Filled Year"--part of a series looking issue by issue at the first year of the Obama Presidency. Robert Gibbs made a good point this week that the media has a fascination with anniversaries but that there seem to be more with Obama than previous Administrations. There was the first 100 days, the second one hundred days, the first six months, the anniversary of the election, the end of the first calendar year and now the end of the first presidency year. Each has been met with similar media stories and discussion--it seems as if we have been reflecting since November.

Related: TIME's Joe Klein had a Q&A with President Obama at this end of this week

Still Related: Washington Post: "One-Year Later: How Obama Has Turned Into a Wartime Commander in Chief" -- an important point to consider even as Obama has been chided this week for his domestic policy & political leadership, he is generally praised for his handling of foreign affairs, international relations and war policy. Conservatives, including Scott Brown, support the strategy for Afghanistan. And few can deny the leadership the US is showing by its swift coordinated response to the Haiti Earthquake. American voters tend to look at the full picture, not just the fascination of the moment. At war, the President has faced enormous challenges this year and has handled each with high marks.

NYTimes, "Times to Charge For Frequent Access to Its Website" I deferred to Brian Reich, author of Media Rules and one of the most intellectual minds in the business for analysis of this move by The Paper of Record. Brian said he supports it, if the Times presents valuable, quality content and reporting behind the password and credit card info. The same old is not going to cut it: the Times has to innovate if they want readers to pay for their news. This move gives them a lot of potential but, as they did with the last example in pay per read, my bet is that they are going to blow it.