Once upon a time, EACH of the group’s properties did all of these things in different proportions, but now each of them will stick to its turf. The Post itself will give us news reports and opinion blogs but not narrative or long essays. The new Newsweek will give us opinion essays and narratives and even blogs, but not, for the most part, hard news. Foreign Policy will give us mostly blogged opinion that expands, occasionally, into longer articles. And Slate (and its children The Big Money and Double X) will give us magazine essays and news articles. There’s some overlap, but that is intentional: some of the content will run in multiple places in tweaked forms. A great blog post on one of the sites can grow into a longer article or essay for another, depending (and this is the key) on what format best fits the story’s content. Sound familiar?

The Newsweek redesign itself fits the magazine’s role within the group as a journal of lay opinion: the new page reminds me most of other opinion mags, especially The New Republic, which is superficially fitting since Newsweek plans to stay left-of-center too. Note also that the font on the new page is more or less the same as that on its academic opinion sister site Foreign Policy, perhaps a subtle way to reinforce brand.

Note finally that it is possible to get this kind of vertical structure without buying one of each kind of outlet: the NYT has managed to grow a newspaper, a blog network, a magazine and a collection of opinion essays in-house; the BBC has done the broadcast equivalent with its marriage of short- and long- form TV and radio.

If the ad model can be fixed to take the lead in revenue generation, while synching staff across platforms increases content expertise and reduces the costs of each story, then I think the media equation-at least at the national and international level-might be solved.

At the other extreme, perhaps, are the media evangelists who seem a bit too excited by Portfolio’s collapse. It will all be fine, they tell us, because the citizen-activists are here to save the day. I will believe it when I see it.

But there is another reason to be sanguine about Portfolio. The collapse of the old media models, accelerated by this crisis, is beginning to spur some real innovation INSIDE old media on ways to merge with and absorb the best ideas from the newbies. Indeed, Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch says that’s the way to save Portfolio’s erstwhile competitors in the biz space: she proposes turning those organizations into full-time professional blogs, with the magazine as a weekly or monthly digest of the blog’s choice items, expanded out to article length, accompanied by the occasional long investigation or narrative. Is it just me, or is this the vertical structure I’ve been touting all along?

One of the benefits of such a structure would be the ability to use technology to add value to stories, instead of just for kicks or clicks. In other words, a professional blogger-journalist would ask themselves, “How does this story work best? As a blog post? As a slide show? As a video? As a long form piece? As a Flash animation? As a podcast?” and then be able to draw on all those technologies to deliver the best content possible. We’d have no more slideshows accompanying stories just to bump page-views, and no more long articles to convey quick info that fits best in a blog post. We’d also be able to nullify a major argument made by citizen-media activists–that they have a role to play because the old folks are incapable of, or unwilling to experiment with, harnessing new technology.

For a great example of how it might work, check out this slideshow from the BBC’s Robert Peston, noting that the Beeb is an old media institution with an integrated structure that now includes TV, Radio, online narrative/articles and blogs.

1. The Democratic primaries finally ended. Sarah Palin helped Tiny Fey find her life’s calling. John McCain sputtered his way to irrelevance leaving President Barack Obama to usher in, among other things, the rise of the individualist left. In Britain, David Cameron gave us a sneak peak of what individualism looks like on the right: war with the NHS. Arlen Specter left the Republican Party, marking, among other things, the breaking of the coalition between institutionalist rightists like Specter and individualist rightists like the party chiefs.

2. Obama’s campaign also highlighted the political power of social media technologies, though the President was not the only practitioner. At various points, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Paris Hilton, Gordon Brown and Hu Jintao, the Swedish police force, and Pakistani legal activists all made forays into interactivity.

3. Despite Robert Wright’s promises to the contrary, many parts of the world continued to grow more violent. Russia went to war in Georgia, Israel went to war in Gaza, Bombay was held hostage, the drug cartels upped the ante on the Mexican border, some IRA hands and Tamil Tigers were up to their old ways. The situation in Pakistan went from optimistic to disastrous, with the military finally deciding a Taliban takeover of the country was worth fighting against today. The Obama administration, meanwhile, turned Pakistan into a counterweight to its Iraq and Iran strategies, continuing and expanding irrationally (and perhaps illegally) hawkish courses of action to balance its dovish stance re: Baghdad and Tehran.

4. The global economy collapsed, taking down Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and a whole host of economic experts, sending the rest of the financial sector and the auto giants to the government for handouts and raising tons of populist rage against Wall Street. One silver lining, perhaps, is a new IMF+Free Trade approach to development that emerged from the London Conference, a dramatic improvement over the Doha disaster.

5. The next big paradigm shift in the web began as the first wave pioneers, like Bill Gates, left the scene, second wave leaders, like Google, started to face criticism, and second wave memes started to lose their luster. Web 3.0, though still in its nascent changes, showed signs of being more oriented towards globalism than its predecessors.

6. The media apocalypse picked up its pace, taking down the Christian Science Monitor (in print), the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Tribune Company, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and most recently, Portfolio. The madness of those on both extremes expanded. Jeff Jarvis called for us all to become Google [who want to help newspapers, promise], while the Associated Press hammered all the aggregator startups for linking fees. But the beginnings of a cross-platform future began to emerge in the ashes of the recession, with the battle on between individualists and institutionalists to structure of that future model.

7. The downsizing of our over-leveraged ambitions brought a downsizing of technology trends, favoring the rise of the netbook over the laptop and desktop and most significantly, the rise of Twitter as a challenger to Facebook. In a sign of the media apocalypse, see above, commentators hailed Twitter not only as a useful social tool, but as some form of alternative journalism. Not only does this violate the speech/press divide (a victory for radical individualists), but confuses what Twitter offers users. Yours truly joined several weeks ago to test the service out, and I’m finding it to be more like Facebook before the applications: Indeed, as one who misses old Facebook, I’m glad to have it as a tool. It is all conversation with people I know that resembles the early days of social networking, lots of aspirational expressions “Maha wishes she could get more sleep.” or “Maha is mysterious,” and very little by way of information content. Indeed, when falsehoods appear on Twitter, there’s no effort by the company to shut them down and a certain flippancy from its founders about what goes on the site. That’s okay, because so long Twitter is just a social platform, it’s not legally or economically accountable for facts.  It’s just people talking, and people lie. That’s why the best “journalistic” use of Twitter I’ve seen is the same as the journalistic use of people in the analog world–quote them saying their piece, go out and verify or debunk what they say and put the raw facts in your words. Twitter, Facebook et al are a beautifully efficient way for reporters to get the views of the man on the street that have peppered our stories for years.

Thanks to everyone who’s kept the conversation fiesty on these pages–here’s to another year of digital caffeination.

Why would Panetta be so worried about this? Because, as Isikoff argued on MSNBC’s Hardball, he is a newbie to the agency who does not have credibility with the career employees who were involved in, but not politically committed to, the Bush agenda. In other words, someone from WITHIN the CIA might have been more able to lead the agency through public scrutiny with grace, counterintuitive as that sounds. This is precisely the kind of problem I had in mind when I critiqued his appointment to the post.

President Obama listened to the law, but I have some qualms with his decision to “look forward,” not backward when it comes to investigating those involved in the torturous practices. Not only because I agree with Keith Olbermann that un-investigated practices could remain as precedent, but also because I don’t completely buy into the assumptions that drive Obama’s decision. Basically, the Obama administration reflects a rising tide in 21st century liberal thought that idealizes the power of transparency. So long as the government comes clean, this argument runs, these practices can’t ever happen again, because the public won’t let them. Implicit in this argument is the notion that somehow the public did not know, and therefore could not protest, what was happening before.

That’s naïve: we didn’t have confirmation before, but you’d have to have been living under a rock not to have seen or heard discussion of these practices over the last 7 years. Moreover, full awareness of government misconduct never worked as a powerful enough check before. The law (an institution) exists to achieve the kind of justice that public opinion, even at its moral best, cannot enforce. Once again, the faith in public opinion (the morality of individuals) is just insufficient.

Here is what stands out about these decisions: Iowa is a longtime “red” state, Vermont was too until the 1990s, and NY and Connecticut, though they vote “blue” in national elections have rather conservative rural populations who play meaningful roles in state policy. Therefore, some changing of minds on the right is at play in the tidal wave of decisions this month.

Now, there are two ways to make the case for gay marriage and they reflect the ideological dichotomy I have been describing on this site, between institutionalism and individualism. The individualist case, the one that dominated the gay marriage movement until this year, is about railing against the oppressive social norms of a heterocentric definition of marriage, defending the rights of all of us to love as we please, and including marriage as one form of love we should all have access to. This is a mostly left-wing argument that is related in its tone and its values to 1960s feminism and “free love.” It made it very easy for the right-wing to counter that same-sex marriage would undermine heterosexual families, in much the same way they critiqued the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

The institutionalist argument for same-sex marriages is different: it claims that all marriages are better than all non-marriages, that society should actively privilege people (of all orientations) who make monogamous commitments over those (of all orientations) who don’t. So, by this line of argument, all marriages are and should be equal, but married love is morally superior to unmarried love and should be a. legalized and b. socially encouraged.

By arguing against free love, the institutionalists take away the right-wing’s main argument against marriage equality: their fear that it dilutes heterosexual marriage. I have a hunch that what made the tide turn in Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut and New York is that conservatives are beginning to think of gay marriage in these institutionalist terms. David Brooks has been saying it for ages, but no one has listened. Steve Schmidt (McCain’s campaign aide) said it this week and his comments were repeated all over the news.

As Schmidt pointed out in his speech, what has changed since Brooks first voiced this idea is the opinions of young people and the increased interaction between young people of different political ideologies and sexual identities permitted by social media. People who may never interact in the physical world are increasingly finding each other online. Young social conservatives, who may spend their physical lives in communities where homosexuality is  derided and policed, are interacting online with young gay Americans–liberal and conservative–and finding out that the interaction doesn’t dilute their value system after all. Schmidt urged his partisans to accept and embrace this fact if they want to be electorally viable in the future.

This blog is subtitled “Reflections on the Revolution in Culture.” This shift on the right, the change in ideals and, slowly, in policy, driven by the coffeehouse-like minglings of the digital age, is precisely the revolution I had in mind.