The Lebanon Daily News received, and quoted, a complaint from a reader. The complaint touched on all of the bad news in the paper, as opposed to the good news of yore.

The newspaper’s reply is a thing of near beauty.

This is not the world as Aurentz remembers; we are not the company that Aurentz remembers. The Lebanon Daily News is not a newspaper company; it is an information-gathering and advertising vehicle that is multimedia in nature.

Once, the newspaper was our end product; our only product. Today, it is a product, one of many, and it carries both opportunities and limitations because of its static nature.

It addresses, in the specific, the complaints from the correspondent and takes the opportunity to brag on themselves, but the Lebanon Daily News also makes a good point:

At no time in our decades of existence has the Lebanon Daily News had such powerful tools and freedom of space to be what we have always been: The best source of news about the Lebanon Valley that exists anywhere.

Taken as a single unit, no one product can necessarily be said to do the full job of providing the Valley with all available information. But when all the products and platforms are seen and used, even a 48-page paper – even a 100-page paper – cannot contain and could not do what we now do as a matter of routine.

The easy thing to do is to take the generational judgment, “This reader is old. The newspaper … err ‘information-gathering and advertising vehicle that is multimedia in nature’ has passed her by and is moving on to other things, forsaking the elderly audience and the non-connected crowd.”

First, you’d like that description to be punched up. Imagine a newspaper being described that way. “An information gathering and advertising vehicle that disseminates news in a static format via low-cost, non-archival paper consisting mainly of wood pulp, typically on a daily or weekly basis.”

Second, we have to find the right ways to reach out to those audiences that are being necessarily and unfortunately marginalized.

We’re doing the same job we’ve always been doing; we’re doing it better than we’ve ever been able to do it before. But it takes more than looking at a 14-page print product to see the truth of that.

There is a third and fourth and fifth, but the second one is where you have to start.

The new number from Pew says that 91 percent of adult Americans own a cell phone. Sixty percent of us are using them to access the Internet. The number that might be overlooked in that survey is the video calling and chatting. That has tripled in the last two years, and is now up to 21 percent.

Most telling lead of the day is from the Wall Street Journal:

American incomes have tumbled over the last decade. But for many people in Washington, D.C., it’s been something of a party.

The income of the typical D.C. household rose 23.3% between 2000 and 2012 to an inflation-adjusted $66,583, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, its most comprehensive snapshot of America’s demographic, social and economic trends. During this period, median household incomes for the nation as a whole dropped 6.6% — from $55,030 to $51,371.

In Alabama the median household income has decreased more than six percent since 2000. Deep poverty, incomes 50% below the poverty line, sits at 8.5 percent, which is a 2.4 percent increase. Across the country 45 states saw an increase in that metric.

Here, meanwhile, is the best editorial I read today.

Closer to home, 50 of the state’s 67 counties are now eligible for natural disaster considerations. We’ve had so much rain — after three years plus of considerable drought — that a lot of farmers have had their crops damaged or ruined. Speaking of drought, look out west.

And now, Jon Stewart on the state of CNN.

Breaking news is hard. Live television is hard. Breaking news on live television is very hard. CNN is still bad.

Did you know about the time that we almost nuked North Carolina? Well, did you know all of the details?

A B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air over Goldsboro, N.C. and dropped two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs. The bombs’ trigger mechanisms started to engage but were stopped by one of the four low-voltage switches. The other three failed.

The bombs carried 4 megatons, or 4 million tons of explosives. They would have been 260 times more powerful than the bombing of Hiroshima. The near-catastrophic incident happened three days before President John F. Kennedy made his inauguration speech.

It isn’t a new story. Some of the details may be freshly fleshed out, but several versions of it — owing to a new book — are making the rounds again.

Some of the uranium was never recovered. Sleep tight!

Finally, I know how this story came about. It started at some other website’s content because someone insisted that the reporters each “file” a certain number of “stories” each day. And one of the accepted ways of doing that is finding something with a local hook and getting your byline over a rewrite.

And that’s regrettable, because you have legitimate news outlets writing things like this: Is it over? RadarOnline says Katherine Webb, AJ McCarron have split; Katherine says website is harassing her. The comments tell the tale.

Really AL.COM……this is the best story you can run. Leave them alone – it’s their business. Sad how you all hound people over nothing…. This would be the appropriate time to use Hillary Clinton’s famous response…… “What difference does it make!”

I don’t know if their relationship is over. However, seeing this “story” prominently featured on the landing page for al.com means journalism certainly is.

Why did you feature this? Did the Kardashians take the day off?

If Marshall Mcluhan were around today he’d say the medium is the message and the commenters are the validation.