misc on planning and papers

via David Wharton, long, good:
To What Extent and in What Ways Should Governmental Bodies Regulate Urban Planning?
pointing out the

...local land-use regulations, traffic engineering, and a web of codes, standards, and practices that have created a mass production system for sprawl on a national scale.
...
If there is a plot running through the length and breadth of land-use regulation in the United States, it most assuredly does not favor New Urbanism.

American Journalism Review article asks why there are so few ombudsmen:

"There is a time in the life cycle of a news organization when hiring an ombudsman is called for," says Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, which dropped its own reader representative position in 2001. "It's when a newsroom has become arrogant and detached and could not recognize its errors in judgment."
...The ombudsman concept made its debut in American journalism at the New York World, which established an internal Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play in 1913. After the yellow journalism era, the World hoped creating the bureau would help it improve its standards...
...there's a widespread perception that the ombudsman is a public relations agent for his or her employer. Not surprisingly, many public editors resist that notion. "I don't want to use the column to make excuses for the newspaper when that shouldn't be done"...

Andrew Cline makes the excellent observation that newspapers concerned about the cost of ombudsmen could avail themselves of underpaid journalism professors.

Via Andrew Tobias:

As long as they're born faster than we can make them hate us, we're in business.