I close with something that one of my daughters wrote to me in a note about my retirement: "Long live true journalism."

Best wishes and so long.

Or Here for a brief interview on KUOW's "The Conversation," toward the end of the segment.

I'll post some farewell thoughts tomorrow.

AdAge quotes Todd Haskell, Times VP-digital sales and operations:

We have been doing full-page interstitials for years. This is just a different placement in the user session.

We collaborate with customers to provide ad units that help them meet their marketing needs, and clients have been asking for a "welcome ad" placement for some time.

Interstitial ads are the ones that creep around on a web page, covering up the other content. My edition of Webster's defines "interstitial" as "of, forming, or occurring in interstices," and "interstice" as "a small or narrow space between things or parts; crevice; chink; crack."

I guess this ad occurs in the space between me and the front page.

In earlier days, the New York Times moved farther and faster than just about any newspaper in allowing advertising to clutter its Web site, including the home page. Commercial messages often were hard to distinguish from news content. It has evolved to be much more orderly and in keeping with the newspaper's brand, although it still has ads that aren't clearly labeled and can be mistaken for news.

Newspapers won't survive without growing their online advertising franchise, but my hope is that they will conclude that an ad covering the entire front page is unwelcome.

The Times doesn't allow inflammatory or objectionable comments, comments that are off-topic, personal attacks or obscene language. Some will deride the newspaper's desire to maintain civility, but so be it. They can work out their aggression elsewhere on the Internet, but not in our house.

At the request of readers who want a respectful dialogue, The Times has restored the forum with this request and warning:

But PLEASE, PLEASE try to keep the discussions civil. Do not attack or denigrate other posters - on the other hand, feel free to dispute their comments with your own informed and mature comments.

We understand that this is a stressful time in this team's history, and that passions run hot. But that doesn't mean this is the Wild West, where anything goes. Children read these boards too....

And we'll be operating on a zero tolerance policy. If you're posting solely to agitate people, you're gone. End of story.

Ironically, the citizen reporter, Mayhill Fowler, is an Obama supporter, which is why she was invited to attend the closed-door session at which the candidate made his comments. Press Here to see her original blog posting on a citizen-journalism portion of the Huffington Post called OffTheBus, which is described as "ground level coverage of campaign '08":

There are many different ways to participate -- you can blog, you can contribute to our group journalism projects, you can monitor local campaign events, or, if you're an expert in a particular subject area, you can make yourself available to OffTheBus contributors for interviews. It's important that you tell us where you're located so that we can notify you of state and local journalism opportunities.

Initial mainstream news coverage of Obama's comments ignored Fowler's role, according to Jay Rosen, who helped create OffTheBus. Rosen explains the back story to Fowler's reporting:

When Arianna Huffington and I conceived of OffTheBus in March of 2007, we talked about this possibility: A contributor of ours gets invited to a fundraiser and tells us what the candidate said there. We knew it was likely because we would be opening OffTheBus to people who were active in politics. We decided that if we trusted the writer, we would probably run the piece, after doing what was necessary to verify the words of the candidate. If the campaigns wanted to try to ban from every gathering of supporters those supporters who had a blog, or a diary at a site like Daily Kos or TPM Cafe, or an affiliation with a project like ours -- well, that didn't seem very practical to us.

We knew there could be problems with this approach, and possible disputes with the campaigns. But we also felt that participants in politics had a right to report on what they saw and heard themselves, not as journalists claiming no attachments but as citizens with attachments who were relinquishing none of their rights. We talked about it, but we never anticipated anything this big, or wave-like.

Rosen said Fowler's post drew 250,000 page views and over 5,000 comments in 48 hours. It also got widespread attention in mainstream media and in the blogosphere, not to mention from the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

This incident reinforces how thoroughly the media landscape is changing. (For example, no meeting is closed if anyone in the room is blogging.) Rosen says citizen journalism is uncharted territory, and responses to his posting suggest many readers will evaluate it based on whether they like the story that is reported.

This one created a frenzy that tells us we are just beginning to see how complicated the future of journalism will be.

Morton's comments come in an article entitled, "Enough is enough," in the American Journalism Review.

The Orange County Register discovered there are 996,716 vehicles registered to California motorists who are affiliated with 1,800 state and local agencies and who are allowed to hide their home addresses under a Confidential Records Program. The Register said its investigation "has found that the program, designed 30 years ago to protect police from criminals, has been expanded to cover hundreds of thousands of public employees - from police dispatchers to museum guards - who face little threat from the public. Their spouses and children can get the plates, too."

A column I read today suggests there is another cloud behind the revenue cloud. Peter Osnos, senior fellow for media at The Century Foundation, says newsroom morale is a problem at least as serious as falling revenue:

The upbeat NAA release said:

Advertising expenditures for newspaper Web sites increased by 18.8 percent to $3.2 billion in 2007, according to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America. Spending on newspaper Web sites has now grown to account for 7.5 percent of all newspaper ad spending last year (up from 5.7 percent in 2006).

That's all true. But Editor & Publisher, an industry observer, studied the data behind the release and found a different story.

The E&P headline said "NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years."

Then a couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from someone in Anchorage asking how to contact Ross. "He stayed with us in Cordova, after the Oil spill and I wanted to send him a note or email," she wrote. (Ross was on the team that won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Exxon Valdez.)

These things must come in threes, because I got an e-mail from Ross last week announcing that he has created a Web site called Rossink.com. It includes links to some of his past work, including his memorable reliving of the Klondike gold rush, and provocative essay on intelligent design. Check it out.

Reuters has put together a powerful narrative, "Bearing Witness: Five years of the Iraq war," about the role of its journalists in trying to bring this story to the world. The presentation includes a compelling photo timeline and video commentary from three journalists: Samia Nakhoul, Goran Tomasevic and Dean Yates, who pays tribute to the seven Reuters staff members who have been killed in Iraq since 2003.

There is also a 5-minute video that includes many disturbing images, but gives a sense of how the war has been witnessed on the ground. Andrew Marshall, Baghdad bureau chief from 2003 to 2005, says:

Iraq has been the most dangerous war in history for journalists. I think it shows the value of what we're doing.

Covering the news in hostile places is a worthwhile thing. It can bring about change and inform the world. And it is worth us risking our lives.

Alastair MacDonald, Baghdad bureau chief from 2005 to 2007, says:

I think the experience of living and working in Baghdad for that time is always going to be with me.

There is a sense of the importance of human life and human relationships that stays with you when you've been in a place where human life is being lost so cheaply.

News coverage of the war's fifth anniversary appropriately focuses on citizens and combatants, but I urge readers to spend a few minutes with the Reuters narrative. It is a reminder of the service of the men and women who bear witness for the rest of us.

Three quarters of the respondents said they think the federal government is very or somewhat secretive. That's up from 62 percent in 2006.

Local government fared a lot better, with 56 percent saying their local government is very or somewhat open. In contrast, 40 percent said local government is very or somewhat secretive, but that is up from 34 percent just last year.

The scariest responses had to do with suspicions about government and personal privacy:

Although only about a quarter of adults believe the federal government has opened their mail or monitored their telephone conversations without a federal warrant, three-quarters believe it has happened to people in the United States and two-thirds say it is very or somewhat likely to have happened to members of the news media.

The most encouraging response is nearly everyone said that when they vote in state and local elections it is important to know a candidate's position and record on open government. That's one reason organizations like the Washington Coalition for Open Government have been asking candidates to take a pledge of openness. (Press Here for more on that.)

On specific issues, the survey said:

People also overwhelmingly want access to information such as who lawmakers meet with each day (82 percent), police reports about specific crimes in local neighborhoods (71 percent), and permits for concealed handguns (66 percent). About half said they do not object to officials asking people seeking records to identify themselves or explain why they'd like to see the record.

Sunshine Week is a non-partisan open government initiative led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

This is Sunshine Week, and Seattle area residents can join the cause tomorrow at the studios of KCTS 9 Television, 401 Mercer Street, Seattle.

Sunshine Week is a national initiative of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to support open government and freedom of information. The town meeting at KCTS is sponsored by the Washington Coalition for Open Government, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization.

The town hall here will start at 10 a.m. with the national broadcast of a panel on government secrecy and your right to know. the broadcast wil be followed at 11:30 a.m. with a local panel in the KCTS studios. The panelists are:

Tom Carr, Seattle City Attorney
William Crittenden, of the Groff Murphy law firm
Rob McKenna, Washington State Attorney General
Sam Reed, Washington Secretary of State
Brian Sonntag, Washington State Auditor
Lynn Kessler, Washington State Representative and House majority leader

Enrique Cerna, executive producer for KCTS will moderate.

The event is free. No RSVP is necessary, just show up at the KCTS studio after 9:30. Press Here for driving directions.

Sunshine Week is endowed by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.