Enthusiasm and dynamic, focused discussions marked last week’s Online News Association09 Conference and Awards Ceremony in San Francisco, in sharp contrast to other gatherings of journalists that I have attended this year. One might say it almost seemed like “irrational exuberance.”

This weekend, my wife and I had the pleasure of watching our daughter and five high school classmates perform in a play entitled “On the Verge; or, The Geography of Yearning,” by Eric Overmyer. The play’s plot deals with the travels of three female explorers who depart in 1888, traveling together to an unnamed land [...]