Media Monitor: Flood aid, McClatchy’s sinking ship and the Googlification of America

• Google’s plot against America! As The Atlantic’s Nicholas Carr wonders if Google is sucking our brains out and local tech blogger Nate Solas ponders the effects of a Google outage, conservatives have other concerns: whether the tech company hates America. Their gripe: the search engine’s occasional "doodles," which have commemorated a trip by staffers to Burning Man and celebrated the World Cup, but failed to gussy up the site with Easter or Memorial Day graphics. File Google’s Sputnik anniversary art under: Google.com(mie).

• Will those who covered the flood be covered? The Iowa Newspaper Association has set up a fund to help media workers displaced or otherwise impacted by the recent floods. Accepting donations by mail or Paypal, the organization’s website states, "You can’t get flood insurance unless you live in the 100-year flood plain and this flood went beyond the 500-year flood plain, so we truly are looking at a disaster of millennial proportions, with much of the damage uninsured." It’s also set up databases in an effort to pair newspapers that have extra resources with those in need.

• Capt. Anders: As debt-strapped McClatchy calls for nationwide layoffs of 1,400 employees after a year in which stock values dropped 70 percent, MinnPost’s David Brauer wonders if one relatively recent hire at the newspaper chain has any regrets. Former Star Tribune editor Anders Gyllenhaal left the McClatchy-owned Strib days before management’s surprise-attack announcement it’d be selling it to Avista Capital Partners. Gyllenhaal’s exit sparked some bitterness among newsroom staff and, from Brauer yesterday, an analogy of Gyllenhaal as "the captain leaping off the raiders’ pirate ship for a seemingly safer corporate schooner, McClatchy’s Miami Herald."