Welcome, and Welcome Back

I don't often blog about blogs, but I want to extend an enthusiastic welcome to Bill Sloat, until very recently the Cleveland Plain Dealer's man on the scene in Cincinnati, who is bloggin' up a storm at The Daily Bellwether. His first post a few days ago suggested that Sen. Mike DeWine should go ahead and resign already. Since then he's churned out about a dozen posts, all of them thoroughly researched, thoughtful, beautifully written, and often hilarious. You won't find this stuff anywhere else. Lots about court rulings and the law, along with public affairs, politics, and personalities. (Interesting blogroll, too -- it alerted me to this blog devoted to all the departures from the PD via buyouts.) As Bill notes here, "the switch to the Internet for news and information has pushed [newspapers] into a down-cycle." Will the arrival of newspaper folk in the blogosphere push it into an up-cycle, quality wise?

Also, it's great to have Pho's Akron Pages back online after a long quiet time due to illness. The blogosphere has been poorer the last few weeks without his wit and insight. Or, you might say, it's been (ahem):

No phun pheeling pholorn as Pho phavors his phans with phewer of his phine phacile opherings while he's pheeling phoul.