The NYT's David Carr on the shifting media paradigm, namely that the public now has some significant influence over the news agenda.

The National Enquirer was the paper pushing the John Edwards/affair/possible paternity story forward while the MSM essentially ignored it (which would be my instinct, quite frankly).

Papers in North Carolina picked up the pace in the last few weeks, and of course Edwards confessed to his bad behaviour in an interview with ABC.

From the Aug. 8 NYT:

On Friday, Phil Bronstein, the former editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, in his blog on that paper’s Web site, poked fun at the reticence of the mainstream media, “picking at it with their noses held, as if looking for something valuable in a moldy dumpster.”

“On journalism sites, the finger-pointing, self-loathing, self-righteousness and tut-tutting was massive,” he wrote. “Does anyone really think that a story splashed in the tabs and debated on blogs like a powerful fire backdraft is somehow not part of the public discourse?”

As Google continues to grow and expands the nature of its business, will it be tempted to do evil and skew search results to pull up Google-owned properties?

Issac Hayes -- soul god, creator of the iconic "Theme from Shaft" and one-time voice of "Chef" on South Park -- is no more.