"Across America," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes in today's Washington Post, "creative, hardworking people in coffee shops, dorm rooms and garages are creating the next era of growth."

But they don't always have good programming degrees, especially if they're Americans, so Zuckerberg hopes to change the nation's immigration laws so that his company can more easily hire cheaper programmers from other countries. It's a win-win situation, for Zuckerburg and his billionaire pals in Silicon Valley.

Ha ha it is really more complicated than all of that, certainly! But this is the great political movement launched by the Web Billionaire generation: something that directly affects the hiring practices and profits [...]

We live in an amazing time for web advertising!

Previously: Ad Obliterates 'New Yorker' Website.

The 4th annual Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest was won by a clever take on the movie Up-but the winner should clearly have been entry #33, a genius Peep reenactment of the infamous D.C. snowball fight that ended with a police officer drawing a gun.

We hear it's "99% done" that Sally Quinn's Washington Post column is also done. Update: Ouch. Quinn's been moved to "online columnist" (welcome, dear!) and will mostly be about White People Jesus and tables, or something?

The Atlantic's James Fallows takes a look at a Times story-headlined "In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril"-versus a Washington Post story-headlined "Stolen files of 'Climate-gate' suggest some viewpoints on change are disregarded"-on the same topic. He concludes: "Not to overdramatize, but: in a way the papers are betting their reputations with these articles. The Times, that climate change is simply a matter of science versus ignorance; the Post, that this is best treated as another '-Gate' style flap where it's hard to get to the bottom of the story."

It's a funny thing, newspapering. Last Saturday, for example, the Washington Post carried a dour dispatch in its business pages announcing that the DC unemployment rate ticked up another half a percentage point in October. This was "its highest level in 34 years of record keeping," noted reporter V. Dion Haynes. While the 11.9% jobless rate is in line with that of other major cities, there's also a peculiar lag in the employment scene here; even though employers in metro DC have added 10,200 jobs in the more credentialed end of the service industries, such as education and health care, they make a poor match for the District's labor [...]

I don't want to spoil anything about this, but you will thank me for the pure, unadulterated joy that clicking on this link will provide you.

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A sad day at The Washington Post, with the news that we're closing all of our local bureaus except Richmond and Annapolis.Thu Sep 01 18:24:20 via webAmy GardnerAmyEGardner

First they came for… etc.

In late 2009, the Washington Post closed its last U.S. bureaus outside of the D.C. area, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. (It also closed bureaus in Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin.) But what of its 11 D.C.-area bureaus? Now there will be two.

A tantalizing Twitter from @Wikileaks went up on Saturday morning: "Real change begins Monday in the WashPost. By the years end, a reformation. Lights on. Rats out."

The series to which they referred, "Top Secret America," by Dana Priest and William Arkin, began today and is certainly a barn-burner. It features an enormous database detailing the thousands of complex connections between private business and the evidently-misnamed intelligence community. The story has been tearing up the Internets all day long, even though Priest and Arkin don't really reveal much that we didn't already know, or at least that we didn't suspect: the government is a mess! 9/11 persuaded [...]

Dear Washington Post,

In your "interactive poll" on whether it is too soon for Tiger Woods to return to playing golf, you instructed those who selected the "not sure" response to "please explain in the comments." So here is my explanation for responding that way.

You may have noticed some very glowing stories this morning about the Washington Post Company! The AP says: "Washington Post Co. quadruples 4Q profit"! That is true! Now, this is a company with many different arms. Two of the wings, the cable TV stations and the Kaplan education services, provide fully 75% of the company's income. But what about the newspapers and magazines, you ask, from which the company takes its name? Well they are in the toilet, actually, and had a very bad year.

At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place. (This person compared this moment to Gutenberg, which might be a little bit far afield but not that far off!) That is that Joshua Micah Marshall is hiring a publisher for Talking Points Memo, the blog he started all on his own in 2000, a bit before all the warbloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds came onto the Internet, and four years before Michelle Malkin. (Oh yes, how soon we forget.) My friend's point was: here is [...]

Tom Scocca: Here is a headline from Sunday's Washington Post: Tom Scocca: In art we lust Tom Scocca: "At second blush, classic works are allowed to rise to their full erotic potential." Tom Scocca: The Post is plagued by bad, amateurish, would-be-snappy headlines these days, and this one epitomizes the problem. Tom Scocca: If you have to change two parts of a stock phrase to make your headline, you are making a dumb and clunky headline. Tom Scocca: "In God We Trust" has nothing to do with the permeability of the barrier between "nude" and "naked" (aka "art" and "pornography"). Tom Scocca: So it's "In [WHOLLY UNRELATED WORD] we [...]

The Washington Post has chosen not to run the current series of comic strip "Tank McNamara" because it includes "a storyline in which – for some reason – Dick Cheney advises NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to kill quarterback Michael Vick." (See it here.) This raises a very important question: Are there any regular daily newspaper comics that are actually funny these days? I'm genuinely curious. Also, say "Mallard Fillmore" and die.

Yesterday, when the Washington Post published a terrible and vague Editor's Note about plagiarism, I looked up the articles that they seemed to be referencing as plagiarized. (Here and here.) And then I discounted them, because of resume bias, and went looking for similar stories in the paper from someone more junior or more obviously inexperienced. After all, the reporter, Sari Horwitz, has been with the paper nearly 30 years. She is a two-time Pulitzer winner. She has a Master's from Oxford!

Number of stories on the front page of the Washington Post about General McChrystal at 1:30 p.m.: FOURTEEN. (Still: Politico had FIFTEEN.) Percentage of above-the-fold editorial web spaces used for those stories: approximately 65%.

27 people canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post when the paper ran this picture on its front page with a story about same-sex marriages licenses being issued in DC. The Post ombudsman describes the complaints he's received, which include the usual homophobic rants and the more measured "This disturbs me and it should be buried" reactions. And, as happens EVERY SINGLE TIME a homosexual couple is shown doing something so perfectly pedestrian that it would be completely unremarkable if its subjects were straight, there was this: "I would appreciate it if your cover pictures would not be so disturbing where my kids can see it easily on [...]

You know what? I'm not going to link to it. They shouldn't be rewarded with the clicks, which is pretty much what this is about, I figure. So here's the email we just got from the Washington Post, announcing tomorrow's piece of Palinography: Sarah Palin WashPost Op-Ed: Obama Should Boycott Copenhagen SARAH PALIN WRITES OP-ED FOR WASHINGTON POST and writes that without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of the politicized climate change conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen. Jennifer Lee Manager, Communications The Washington Post

The Washington Post announced today the winner of its America's Next Top Pundit reality blog contest thing. (Yes, that really happened.) Here's a spoiler: the people of color lost. (Again.) RIG. (Or maybe they won by losing?) Further spoiling: the winner is a Teach for America (ACORN?) executive named Kevin Huffman. We look forward to his appearances on all those chat shows that we don't watch because we treasure our sanity.

The wonderful Gene Weingarten weighs in on the recent fisticuffs at the Washington Post style desk. (In case you hadn't heard, an editor and a reporter came to blows over a story.) He gives it a "hooray"-that people still care enough to brawl. He's right-just think about the end of Giant, when the dinosaur daddy of the family starts brawling with a racist on behalf of ill-treated Mexicans. Yes! "Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions-a situation thought of as 'creative tension' and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a [...]