The Times's Al Siegal retired last month. Siegal was The Authority at NYT on standards, ethics and language and was surrounded by what the Observer accurately called an "Old Testament sort of awe." He also has the byline on a little item called The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. In my final weeks at The Times, I had a meeting with Siegal to talk about the paper's plans to overhaul its process for receiving and responding to corrections. This was well before the Jayson Blair troubles broke. The newsroom wanted to be more responsive and field more inquiries and complaints more quickly. I was invited to the table to offer thoughts about how the web site or web tools might help gather, route or respond to inquiries. I'd had the chance to interact with Siegal a few times before, but he rose to mandarin heights in my…

I can understand why NYT put a giant video player prominently on the homepage of their newly-designed site. It smacks a little of the bells-n-whistles misconception big media still has about new media, but it's also competitive and of its time. CNN.com launched a huge video module a few months ago too. But if you're gonna slap a freeze frame on your site, please take a little care. I've seen some weird images on there recently, and the combo of photos this morning, along with the freeze frame in the video box, added up to something of a jumble, IMHO. By the way, there's a lot I do like about the new site - in particular the scrollable promos in the middle of the page and the finally cleaned up left navigation that reaffirms that it's a list of newspaper sections, not a billboard for "subvertorial" spots so the former…

In the Toronto Star, an already much-blogged story about anxious, whiny kids tending to grow up conservative, according to a study in Berkeley, CA (hmm...), while the more easygoing, confident kids grow up liberal. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings. A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow…