What I mean is, the magazine fired let go downsized right sized fired a slew of its long-term columnists, notably Steve Bass, Steve Manes, and Dan Tynan. Why? One can assume it’s that the idea of having loyal, long-term writers with a significant following who helped make the magazine great… well, they’re not needed anymore.

Circuit City did this when it fired it’s knowledgeable, experienced employees in favor of the fly-by-night sales staff. (So, CC, how’d that work out for ya?)

Anyway, the good news is that I heard from Steve Bass, and — like all smart and driven folks, he’s moved on to the next thing — taking his brain (and his column) to a new place.

That new place is TechBite, where you’ll be able to read his column and — well, who knows what else.

But here’s how I see it: You can get buying guides and how-tos just about anywhere. A Google search will find you 50,000 ways to do anything you want. What makes a magazine worth reading is its personality and its features. When you let folks like Bass &tc. go, you lose those things and become just another review site.

So go visit Steve.

I am getting really tired of the media reporting the government’s unemployment press releases and not taking 30 seconds to look at the actual unemployment numbers.

It’s very simple to me: The unemployment rate is based on the number of people who want and are able to hold full-time jobs but aren’t. Period.

Imagine 100 people.

• 75 of them have full-time jobs.
• 15 can’t work (because of age, disability, etc., of because they’re students)
• 10 want to work but can’t find a job

Your unemployment rate is — wait for it — 10 percent. Simple. (You can make it more complicated if some of those 10 have part-time jobs; maybe the rate is 8 percent. But the math is clear.)

Unless you’re the government, and unless you’re the news media reporting those numbers. Because what the government does is not count “everyone who’s not working but wants to.” Instead, it counts “everyone who’s not working, wants to, and is collecting unemployment benefits.”

If you unemployment bennies have run out, the government doesn’t consider you unemployed.

The Bureau of Labor statistics says that for September 2008…

• There are 154,509,000 members of the civilian labor force
• 9,199,000 are unemployed
• Ergo, unemployment is 5.95 percent — that’s the “6 percent” number you’ll see

But it also says that there are an additional 4,895,000 people who want a job but can’t find one. So in reality…

• There are 154,509,000 members of the civilian labor force
• 14,184,000 are unemployed, can work, and want to work
• Ergo, unemployment is 9.18 percent — that’s the “9.2 percent” number you should see

Note to the media, big and small: This isn’t very hard to find. It’s right in the BLS release, not even buried.

Oh, and the same logic applies to inflation. When you read that inflation is at 2.5 percent (as of August), remember that the number doesn’t reflect food and energy prices. Because — seriously — food and energy prices change a lot. (!)

Curious? The inflation rate for food in August was 6.1 percent, and for energy, 27.2 percent. So inflation is well above 2.5 percent — probably closer to 5 or 6 percent when you include everything.

But don’t worry.

* * *

Addendum: According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, inflation for August, including food and energy, was about 5.5 percent:

I’m really impressed by the Web sites that have sprung up to spread information about Hurricane Gustav. No government required — regular folks created full-featured sites for people to share information, photos, videos, and whatever as Gustav approached and struck.

Just like Wikipedia, the Hurricane Gustav Wiki allows anyone to add and edit content, creating a one-stop for information. Information like….

…traffic maps, aid agencies and donations, federal and local government resources, FEMA registration, postal services, insurance information, national and local phone numbers, animal rescue resources, health and safety information, shelter lists, ham radio resources…

You get the idea. All of this is created and maintained by average Janes and Joes. And that, my friends, is the power of social media. A government-created site would have info, sure, but you can guarantee it wouldn’t be nearly as comprehensive (ham radio info?), and wouldn’t include on-the-ground updates, e,g., “The 14th street shelter is full — don’t bother going there.”

Meanwhile, the Gustav Information Center, also set up by regular folks, is more of a social network in that users can post blog entries, photos, video, and so on. It even has an interactive map showing evac routes and shelters. If you want the latest news on what’s really going on, that’s the place to be. (It’s not just user-created stuff. It’s also pulling in mainstream news feeds related to the storm.)

Even if you aren’t affected by Gustav, it’s worth taking a step back and marveling at this stuff. The Gustav Wiki was built using the same software that powers Wikipedia. From experience I can say that it probably took about two hours to set up, if that. The Gustav Info Center was created on Ning, a site that lets anyone set up a social network in a matter of minutes.

In other words, all this incredible, high-end functionality took the creators no time at all to have up and running. And now they’re the defacto home pages for the storm.

(The Center for Social Media has a short post about both these sites, too.)

• • •

Looking at all this got me into researching social-network software in case anything interesting ever happens. :) I could use Ning, but I like the idea of self-hosted stuff. I first looked at content-management systems (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla), then social network packages (Elgg) and finally realized that what I wanted was groupware. And the big name in that category is TikiWiki.

So I’m creating a test platform to see how long it would take me to create “Whatever Information Center.” It doesn’t have to be a disaster, of course; it could be “Richmond Election Day Information Center” or “Summer Kids’ Activities” or whatever. I’m tossing around ideas in my head (not a long distance to toss) about what such a site would need and what it wouldn’t.

Who knows — maybe next time I’ll be the one running a site like this.z

Oh, waily, waily, waily goes the blogosphere — the Washington Post, it was said, Photoshopped an image of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

Let the hand-wringing begin. “[S]o if they’re willing to change the photo in a story, is there any reason to think that they wouldn’t change a story’s facts or exaggerate things?! Mainstream media is turning into a complete farce” wrote one commenter.

Problem 1: The photo wasn’t in the Washington Post; it was in the paper’s free weekly pub, Express. But saying “Doctored photo in the Washington Post!” sounds better.

Problem 2: The photo was real. It wasn’t Photoshopped.

Chris Combs, photo editor at the Washington Post Express, weighed in on BoingBoing:

This is a Getty photo and I ran it verbatim. I don’t have time for Photoshop.

The one error to which our sports editor will likely admit is that it is credited to “Stuart Franklin/AP,” whereas it is “Stuart Franklin/Getty Images” that took the photo. Here is the picture on Getty’s site.

And thus, once again, we see the difference between bloggers and journalists. Bloggers don’t have to check facts, they can rely on the truthiness of something — their gut feeling — to make a claim of fraud. But a journalist couldn’t get away with just saying something is true because, gosh darn it, it feels true. He would have to, you know, check facts.

One of the more famous examples of this was when right-wing extremist Michelle Malkin claimed that the Associated Press had fabricated a source, citing her “contacts.” In fact, the source was real, the AP produced him, and Malkin issued a half-hearted apology.

Journalists check facts. And when they don’t, the whole world knows — right, Dan Rather?

So while bloggers can talk about the imminent demise of the mainstream media, they really don’t have anything better to replace it.