• More and more, businesses are looking to inject right-brained thinking into management practices, leading the Harvard Business Review podcast to ask whether the MFA is the new MBA.
• Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg discusses how the word “elite” is used and abused in American politics with NPR’s On The Media.
• The New Republic provides an update on Rupert Murdoch’s effort to remake our favorite paper The Wall Street Journal.
• As a group, and perhaps not suprisingly, senior executives are heavy consumers of all forms of media.
• In this interesting run down of recent B-School research, Business Week looks at studies dealing with gender differences in saving money, talking up your competition, and whether the mere sight of the Apple logo makes you more creative. Check it out.
• How social media is changing and moving the stodgy PR field.
• The ongoing battle royale: Social networks vs. TV networks.
• Over at the Freakonomics blog (add it to your reader, it’s great), Arthur C. Brooks is writing an interesting and provocative series on research indicating that conservatives are happier than liberals (the series is called “The Politics of Happiness”). The discussion is well worth reading and participating in - even if you think that’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard.

Other people commented and said I am jumping on the “citizen journalism bandwagon.” One wrote that, if you followed my argument, journalism will look like that job site commercial where hundreds of fans at a tennis match rush the court and try to play.

All of the people commenting said I don’t understand that the value that journalists bring is accuracy, and that giving consumers control over content will create a messy concoction of truth and fallacy posing as journalism.

It’s not an either/or proposition. Saying that success in the future will require ceding some control to consumers is not saying that journalists should go get new jobs. Of course not. How do people get information now? They rely on journalists, yes. But they rely just as much on their neighbor, the postman, the clerk at the store, their priest, and so on. The online newspaper that figures out how to bring both to their site will win their market, hands down.

My other bet is that it won’t be today’s brand name newspapers that do this. Somebody new will move into the media space and create, local market by local market, online news sites that combine journalists’ reporting and analysis, with local citizenry filing reports. That’s how people have got their information for centuries — somebody’s going to figure out how to bring that together on the web and actually make money.

• If marketing guru Seth Godin edited the New York Times. Actually, he points out what newspapers are still good for.
• If you haven’t already, check out The Washington Post’s coverage of the death of Mildred Loving.
• More on Twitter: Zappos has found other, less dramatic, uses for the growing online tool.
• Still trying to figure out what this RSS thing’s all about or what a “news feed” is? Watch this video to find out.
• Dave Morgan says Yahoo would have been bad for Microsoft, and predicts what really will happen next.
• How on earth can you find time to blog? Here’s 10 tips for making it happen.
• Blogenberg loves Washington, DC (notwithstanding our war over why Virginia is better than Maryland). But this podcast  offers some interesting insights on how your choice of cities can determine a lot of things about your life.

In 1958, Caroline County (Virginia) Judge Leon M. Bazile said these words as he sentenced Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman, to a year in prison for violating the state’s law against blacks and whites marrying. The judge suspended their sentence in exchange for them agreeing to leave the state for 25 years.

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court heard their case, ruling that such miscegenation laws are against the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, that they are “measures designed to maintain White Supremacy…[and] there can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

Mildred Loving died on Monday. (Her husband had died in a car crash many years before.)

I’m old enough to understand that 1967 was not that long ago. That’s the thing about getting older — the span of time reveals itself as a continuum. What seemed a lifetime ago, you realize, is just part of a lifetime.
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Mildred Loving’s lifetime ended Monday. Tuesday evening, my wife and I — a couple of the same colors as Mildred and Richard Loving — watched one of our offspring, our 14-year-old daughter, win the county 800 meter championship (going away, if I might brag). I’d like to pretend I told her the story of the Lovings and she ran inspired. No. She just ran, faster (much!) than all of the other qualifiers. Just part of a lifetime.

My friend told the medium about me, just briefly.

The medium responded, “I find him annoying.”

I am, therefore, annoying. I mean, it’s one thing if a regular old person says I’m annoying — that’s debatable opinion. But a medium is supposed to know, feel, and understand true spiritual energy. If she finds me annoying, I cannot argue. I am, at the essence of my spiritual energy, annoying.

It’s somewhat liberating, to tell the truth. If I’m annoying at the spiritual level, well I might as well just go ahead and annoy the heck out of you and everybody else. Because, to quote the Highwaymen, “I is what I is ’cause I ain’t what I ain’t.” And I is annoying.

(For the record, Blogenberg may be skeptical but is in no way dismissive of mediums as Blogenberg is not arrogant enough to think the world can be fully understood.)

• Student uses Twitter to contact friends and get out of jail in Egypt.
• Interview with entrepreneurial guru Guy Kawasaki on pitching your product for venture capital.
• In this edition of BNET’s Useful Commute podcast Dan Roam explains how to use simple pictures to explain concepts that typically require complex presentations (at great expense of time and energy). Also discussed at Fast Company.
• Poet Taylor Mali on speaking with authority. (hint: learn to articulately express what you’re “like” actually thinking).
• A recurring theme in this feature is dealing with the rush of content (e-mail, blogs, facebook, etc). Steve Rubel offers tips for dealing with Attention Crash.
• Eight reasons small businesses are good for America.
• The Pentagon Experts story offers an excellent view at how the media (in this case the television) media shy away from certain stories the public cares about - so they go online and to print sources to find the info.
• BNET discusses how to build, run, and duplicate effective teams in the workplace.

Profitability of many products is driven both by market share and what category the product occupies. So, for example, whether premium brands or value brands dominate a category impacts how market share relates to profitability. And moving to or stretching into a new category requires careful planning and execution. Some brands have done it very well. Some brands have not. Mercedes did it flawlessly in introducing the C-Class. Jaguar stumbled when it introduced its “lower-class” model.

I’ve been intrigued to see John McCain stand on that famous bridge in Selma, or walk the streets of New Orleans stating the obvious-but-important observation that the current administration failed that city’s citizens (especially, and painfully, minority citizens) following Katrina.

John McCain, obviously, has very strong market share in his principal product category: Republicans. He also enjoys rather strong market share among independents. So, during this time of waiting for the conventions and an opponent, he decides to present perhaps a new picture of himself to categories where he’s not so strong: Democrats, African Americans, etc.

I’m not being cynical. Not at all. John McCain does not strike me as a man who says the President should have been on the ground in New Orleans, not up in a plane flying over looking down, if he doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t strike me as a man who pays tribute to painful memories on that bridge in Selma, if he doesn’t mean it.

And it strikes me that he and his team are doing some very smart brand stretching.

Me: I wish you’d consider running track in high school.

Teen daughter: I don’t want to.

Me: But you have so much talent.

Teen daughter: I don’t want to.

Me: Well, maybe when you get to high school you’ll change your mind.

Teen daughter: Dad, if it didn’t mess up my hair I’d run track, but it does, so I won’t.

Me: [Speechlessly praying that she returns from this other universe]
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A local radio news reporter broadcast a 30-second story this morning. It included, “beyond his wildest dreams,” “apple of his eye,” and “hope against hope.” Wow. All in 30-seconds. But this only comes in second.

Denzel Washington wrote a letter of support for Wesley Snipes. “Wesley is like a tree — a mighty oak,” Washington wrote in his letter to the judge. “Many who know him have witnessed the fruit of his labors, have sat in his shade and even been protected by his presence.” Wow. That wins the first ever Blogenberg best writing I’ve ever, ever, ever read while using metaphor like an editorial stealth missile award.

• Business Week ranks The World’s Most Innovative Companies.
• Wikileaks is a great site for finding leaked information and documents.
• Slippery versus sticky - Strategic Public Relations discusses the difference between websites that offer an experience versus just a visit.
• What is a blogger? The most recent (and interesting) demographics of bloggers.
• A few days old, but still a very good read on building a small business and sweating the small things.
• Blogenberg lives in this county. Blogenberg is disgusted, yet not surprised, by this example of racism by wealthy “enlightened” white people.
• At CNET, Charles Cooper explains how PR is changing in “Revenge of the Flacks“.
• How can a good video get millions of views, yet still leave unanswered the most important question: did we sell more shoes? MediaPost explains how with the new Kobe Bryant viral video.

It’s not his controversial former pastor, whom I’ve blogenberged about previously. It’s that, with his impressive oratorical skills, he sometimes forgets he’s not in an African-American church. That’s what happened with his recent “bitter gate.” He didn’t say anything so awful. He didn’t say anything that would make a reasonable person conclude he’s elitist. But he gave attacks an opening.

I’ve been the only white face in an African-American church, at an African-American wedding, and in an African-American club. My wife often listens to the Sunday sermons at Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel at Howard University, and I listen along. It doesn’t make me any darker than the average white guy, just a bit different in my insights.

Homilies at African-American churches often mix political with the spiritual. Not every line would pass a magazine’s fact checker (I’m not sure they would in my church, either) — or political opposition research, for that matter — but the meaning and the feeling are expertly communicated. Obama’s real good at that style of communicating. But, as he’s learning with “bitter gate,” it can be dangerous in politics.