Working with Knoxville News Sentinel, I've gotten an agreement set with Scripps Howard to distribute my KNS weekly column. That agreement was to be in place starting in early October, and as such, I had great hopes that either my "Dr. No" column of two weeks ago or last week's "China/North Korea" column would start appearing in Scripps network of 400 or so news outlets, but I've yet to find any examples of this happening, which depressed me some over the past two weeks.

Even so, my gut instinct was that something bureaucratic was holding things up.

So I ego surf today (getting the Steyn hit, for example) and come across the column "A journey worth taking" on the Scripps website under the commentary file. My submitted title was "A bigger definition of 'us,' a better nation at heart," which--quite frankly, wasn't so hot, so I like Scripps' title better (or maybe it was KNS'). The direct page link is http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/15166.

Google's hit dates it as 23 Oct, which is weird, because I didn't turn the piece in to KNS til the 24th. At Scripps, the date is 25 October, or yesterday.

Now, I'm hoping this appearance doesn't suggest that I can only crack Scripps when I do an Erma Bombeck/sensitive Tom column. If so, then expect me to note that the crab grass is always greener in the other yard.

But seriously, I expect to find out that this one was the first to appear because it just took this long to get all the ducks lined up with Scripps.

Now, here's what I don't know:

First, is this all there is in terms of Scripps distribution? Being posted on their web site? I know that's not the usual case, as the whole point is to fill newspaper pages. So I'm guessing that anytime Scripps distributes a column that it also posts them on its website. Maybe this will be the usual drill: my "weekend" column goes on Scripps and on this basis is made available to papers for printing at that point. At least that's my hope here.

Second, if Scripps is going to post like this, does that dilute the utility of KNS's printing its hard-copy version in the Saturday or Sunday edition? Or will we have to control the timing of our sharing of columns with Scripps to avoid premature publication in the future?

Either way, I see this as a neat step forward that I'll do my best to exploit on behalf of Oak Ridge and Enterra and my general role as thought leader.