Life is lovely here outside L.A., but one of the downsides (aside from the fact that it takes an hour to get across town to a TV studio!) is that too often, you miss wonderful occasions like the 20th anniversary celebration for Elayne Bennett's Best Friends Foundation.

Luckily, the Corner's Kathryn Jean Lopez has covered it here.

The success of Best Friends has played a significant role in proving that young people thrive when they are offered "abstinence education" that is at once deeper and more transcendant than "don't do it or you'll get pregnant or contract an STD."  When sex education becomes about something more than putting condoms on bananas -- and treated as a part of overall character education -- the results are amazing.

President and founder Elayne Bennett's motto for the Best Friends Foundation is: We must offer our children our best.  If we do, they will surely respond with their best.

She is so right.  We get what we expect from our children. 

God bless Elayne Bennett for her hard work and high expectations.  They have made a great difference in the lives of so many.

Michael Barone has a column out on Douglas Feith's War and Decision in which Barone makes the important point that we are just now beginning to understand the decisions that followed 9/11 and led to the successes and the setbacks since, and that Feith's book is an important insider account of those years.

I will be visiting the Hoover Institution as a Media Fellow next week, and am watching Peter Robinson's magnificent interview with Thomas Wolfe as prep.  I will dragoon Peter to co-host as much of the show as he can be persuaded to do next week.  Howard Mortman and Victor Davis Hanson will also be about, so a fine week of broadcasts ahead.

It will be the week of decision on the polar bear listing, one of those controversies of which the MSM is barely aware but which has far reaching consequences for American industry and economic growth.  Like the civil war raging in Lebanon (Michael Totten has the best coverage of course) or the heparin not-quite-effective-recall or the Rezko trial, the MSM doesn't understand the many moving parts of a complicated story like the push to list the polar bear as threatened, and is staffed by folks of truncated curiosity which combines with contempt for their audience to produce hours and hours of nonsense.  FNC works to bring panels of smart people of differing opinions together to discuss complicated subjects for decent stretches of time, as does CNN occasionally, but generally it is a wasteland on cable and worse on the big 3.  Talk radio and C-SPAN are pretty much alone in allowing someone like Jindal to appear and discuss many subjects for a half hour or more, which is why radio is the most powerful form of serious media left. (C-SPAN doesn't make much of an effort to add pacing, but it is still valuable beyond belief, as when it airs the full Michelle Obama speech.)

How can the world's most advanced economy blessed with an explosion of technology produce such genuinely mediocre broadcast news day after day?

Why doesn't Peter Robinson's interview with Tom Wolfe air on some channel?  Why isn't there a fast-paced but comprehensive program covering the polar bear debate, or featuring Totten or Michael Yon explaining what they saw going on in Lebanon or Iraq?

The answer of course is that broadcast execs don't believe such programming is possible or that it would bring them ratings (and that PBS is so institutionally left-wing as to have no clue about building an audience of other than Bill Moyers groupies.)

Oh, and here's the first online anti-Obama superstore.

How are you physically playing this clarinet along with the whales?

Was there any indication that the whales found what you were doing interesting?

Do you think it could bring peace to the world through prayer?

Buzzwatch: Sum up the basic changes you’re talking about.

Mr. Shirky: My five word summary of the book is: Group action just got easier. The thesis is that humans are natively good at doing things in groups. We know how to share, collaborate, converse. So whenever you get a new tool or technology that makes it easier for people to share or collaborate, you’re going to see a lot more of that going on. The Internet–and increasingly, mobile phones–have provided us with a platform of huge new tools and services to do exactly that. So we’re seeing now the first phase of experimentation and people saying, “What can we build on top of these tools?”

Buzzwatch: What does a CEO need to understand about the ways collaboration is changing?

Mr. Shirky: There are two different big things. The first is: Inside your hierarchy is a network. This isn’t about networks replacing hierarchies–we’re still going to have managers and promotions. But particularly for large companies, there’s a lot of value that can be unlocked by letting employees work with one another. There were two research groups at IBM separated by the Atlantic Ocean–one in Armonk and one in the U.K. They were working on the same problem, but of course they didn’t know that. They employed a tool IBM built called Dogear, a tagging tool. These two groups discovered–without any managerial oversight–that they were working on the same problem. They said, “Why don’t we get together and collaborate?” That’s the kind of enterprise value that can’t be driven by the manager. In any complicated field, the people you’re managing know more about the problem than you do. This is a way of getting at that value.

The outside message is: Your customers, who have previously been relatively separated from one another, with their principal connection to you, may start becoming your competitors or your collaborators. CEOs need to be in the position of understanding what might happen and then try to work out strategies for the threats and for the opportunities.

(Emphasis added.) Recently I e-mailed a senior exec-friend caught up in a high profile battle being covered by the media that he needed to get Kithbridge.com to establish some new media monitors/blog tracks.  Even though I am an investor in Kithbridge, I wouldn't know if he did or not, but increasingly the idea of allowing the virtual mobs to gain size and accumulate influence without even attempting to see them coming is close to corporate malpractice.

From: Bill Keller/NYT/NYTIMES
Date: Wed, 7 May 2008 07:21:47
To: [New York Times newsroom]
Subject: A Message to the Staff from Bill Keller

Colleagues:

A little over two months ago, I told you that we would have to reduce staff within the newsroom by roughly 100 jobs given the difficult financial challenges facing our business and the deteriorating national economy.
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