And by this photo “Caption: Timothy Murphy of the New York City Search and Rescue Task Force peers into a hole on the top floor of a collapsed technical college in Port-au-Prince looking for survivors who may be trapped.” an ad for Florida prepaid college plans.

It’s odd – I know CNN.com runs ads next to their top news coverage, and the ads look like the same size. But on CNN.com they are easy to ignore, while in the slideshow popup on PalmBeachPost.com they are more noticeable. That may be good for advertisers (unless there is a public backlash). It’s still disturbing.

One of the messages just bounced as being undeliverable. That’s understandable because I had fat-fingered his address. He couldn’t be expected to respond to something he hadn’t received.

I’ll post an update if / when I hear from anyone else.

I understand that point, too. There are some strange Google ads that pop up on my blogs.

I remember doing a piece on road rage only to have ads for Hummers and monster SUVS run next to it.

Old-time, small-town papers might not have been objective, might have had an axe to grind and might have been bad in a whole raft of ways, but the publisher had his finger on every word that was printed.

When an editor told me right after I was hired, “The publisher’s policy is that he never wants to see [a local contractor's] name in the paper unless he’s being indicted for something, I made darned sure his name never appeared.

If Freedom of the Press belongs to he (she) who owns one and you’ve given up control of your print product and you can’t control the web content, then where does that leave us?