That groundhog can bite me

Today's sunny weather brought out a bunch of blooms in my garden that have really lifted my spirits. Halfway through February and everything's starting to come back to life. Here are a few of the friendly faces that caught my eye today.

Will t.v. news benefit from the demise of print media?

My friend Dennis sent this link my way, and I find it interesting that there's an assumption that television news can thrive without newspapers, or that they're better positioned to weather the recession than print media. In my experience, local television stations are cutting back staff as well, and considering they already have much smaller news teams than newspapers do, the lack of warm bodies is becoming more evident.
And because their news-gathering abilities are limited due to lack of staff, they are becoming even more dependent on gleaning (stealing) news from newspapers and either reading it directly from the AP or other sources and claiming it as their own, or sending a news crew to cover a story based on what they've read in the morning paper. If newspapers die, so does that constant source of local news. Considering Corvallis has no local television station, and Eugene stations are less and less willing to invest the gas money to send their crews north, if the papers here disappear, there is really no one left to cover local news.
Just some things to consider as the fate of newspapers becomes all the more uncertain.