SOME YEARS my father's birthday fell on Father's Day. In many ways, that was appropriate. For all of his professional success, I think what gave my father the most profound sense of joy was being a dad.

No matter the medium, the subjects were the same. Jesse Jackson made some rather unwise remarks about Barack Obama and the New Yorker published a satirical depiction of the Obamas that many thought missed the mark. The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media.

Two days after the election both UNITY and the National Association of Black Journalists sent out open letters urging the media to redouble their efforts to diversify staffs in the aftermath of the historic election of Barack Obama. At the same time, others privately wondered if there are some people who would argue that the election of the first African-American president signaled the country has moved past the need to be concerned about racial equity. It is true that some television networks put on air more African-American commentators during the campaign. Those additional voices, however, were not numerous enough to avoid the frequent appearance of all-white panels to discuss race relations. That lamentable pattern and other media missteps, such as a New York Times story on the shifting African-American landscape that did not quote any African-American sources, were vivid examples of why the traditional media's reputation and credibility depend on their ability to diversify their ranks as quickly as possible.

Go to Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog and you don't know if you're going to find a post on politics, poetry, the NFL or the world of videogames. A journalist who has worked at Time Magazine and the Village Voice, Coates started his own blog after being laid off from Time Magazine. Then, back in August, the author of the recently released "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood," was added to the magazine's roster of bloggers at the Atlantic.com. There he continues to interweave culture and politics in posts that ruminate on topics ranging from questioning whether the number of unwed mothers in the African American community really has increased, to the intellectual laziness that prompts people to rely on history to predict the future.

By now almost everyone knows that a group of demonstrators protesting against the killing of a young father by a transit officer splintered off and began a wave of destruction in downtown Oakland.
Mainstream media outlets called it everything from a riot to a violent protest. Some bloggers referred to it as a civil unrest, rebellion or both a riot and civil unrest.

In a few weeks the American Society of Newspaper Editors will release its annual census. The census, created to capture an accurate picture of the industry's diversity, will also tell us how many jobs were lost in this year of layoffs, buy-outs and shuttered newspapers. As newspaper companies struggle with advertisers and audiences continuing to migrate to the web, the horrifying and at times mind-numbing rate at which the industry appeared to be imploding has take the question of diversity virtually off the table. As one newspaper CEO said to me a while back, "Diversity isn't only off the front-burner, it's not even in the kitchen."

This year for my birthday I got three calls. Two people sent cards. And I don't think I ever received so much attention in my life. I have to say, it was fabulous turning 51 years old on Facebook.

Over at TheRoot.com, Kim McLarin points out the ridiculousness behind the rumor that floating "out there" exists a tape of Michelle Obama using the term "whitey." (07/01/08)

When the filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), her wish was to create one day where people across the world gathered at the same time to watch films produced by international filmmakers.(06/10/08)

Blaring red headlines on the Drudge Report announced to the world that the three New York City Police who shot Sean Bell 50 times, killing him, were found not guilty. Drudge, with his right wing reputation, it turns out was one of the only mainstream white blogs to prominently play the Bell verdict. In fairness, the Huffington Post did have a small headline about the verdict.