I must be on the meta-media diet

Today was ultra-satisfying for my media-consuming (inhaling?) self. First there was a fabulous David Carr writeup on his late-night encounter with Eric Schmidt at Herb Allen's Sun Valley confab. This line in particular made me swoon:

"He [Eric] walked out onto the patio and surveyed all the corporate might arrayed before him — and then chose to plop down with a group of workaday reporters and photographers. It was the journalistic equivalent of DefCon4."

Watch out for that Carr. He's a caution.

Then, because it was Friday, I got the delightful Rojo week-in-blogging roundup. Always a great read, always clickable. I sure like the Reds. Then I stopped by the sainted Romenesko, where the ink stains set in as you scan. One feels (or maybe just I feel? Nah.) so insider-y when I read those bits. Where else would I find MarketWatch's comparison of The New Yorker and New York? Or the shudder-inducing tidbit that vile LA Times publisher David Hiller is proposing front page ads for the paper? Ai yi, in a word.

But then the day got even better, because a colleague from another team looked me up and came over for a chat. In an instant we fell into media chatter. She used to work for the FT and the Times of London, so I dove right into the Murdoch questions. She agreed that Ken Auletta hit the high points in his New Yorker profile (as did David Carr in his earlier pieces, natch). She knew who Joanne Lipman is. She agreed with me about why Wired is still alive when so many others are not. We talked about John Mackey's blog and the kerfuffle over our own health advertising blog.

We did all this without missing a beat. A delightful encounter with a compadre - a kindred spirit attuned to communicating - listening - watching. Then we touched on a planned writing workshop for a bunch of our employee-writers this coming fall. And this was after a sleepless night, by the way, where I turned the pages of A Personal History once more (and discovered Nora Ephron's fabulous 1997 review of same).

The drive home led me to ponder why I consume so much media. There's something about the banquet notion that's appealing - there are many choices, and there's always more. There are always new dishes to try. And then - there's just so much terrific writing and presentation to be had. It's not always that I crave the latest news (though I can stare disappointedly at unchanging heds in Google News with the best of them); it's more that I crave the latest takes. And the best takes. And reader, they are out there for the taking!

I'm going to try to keep this up, if for no other reason than to capture and comment on all the great stuff I see when I stick my hand in the river. No real excuses for the last silent period, but I'll talk about my mom's decline soon.