Fun things:
Woodward and Bernstein papers at UT, now in an online exhibit. Some great original files here. I love this, it looks like someone scooped up my old desk at the Washington Post.

Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story on whether newspapers (and their archives) should be free, a topic we're all talking about lately. Includes some thoughtful quotes from really interesting people, like John Batelle:

A publication without a point of view isn't worth reading," avers John Battelle, a cofounder of Wired magazine and columnist at BoingBoing. "At the end of the day, this fabled mythology of objectivism has hampered newspapering."

AskSam does it again with Searchable State of the Union address (you'll have to download the AskSam search software -- the viewer is free). There are links to all the other political documents AskSam has been putting online, a guide to how to create this sort of database, and useful links.

On another note, I should mention that after I complained a couple weeks ago that I wasn't finding good local news on Topix I got an email from CEO Rich Skrenta asking for specifics and telling me that they recently changed their local news relevance algorithm. When I went back and checked the same local news I normally browse, there were again lots of stories (the page that once had a normal 20 stories had gone down to 3 for awhile). Skrenta also clarified that Topix does normally have news from international sources, although when both of us checked the tsunami news I had cited, only U.S. sources were showing up.
All this discussion of a news source I have used and liked for quite awhile now, leads in to the news that Topix has reached a deal with the New York Times to feature links to their stories.