I read Janet Paskin’s story The Velvet Rope in the Columbia Journalism Review this month and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Basically, she lays out the primary reason journalists like to see their name in print — they get paid more for it. This is, for me, a point of frustration.

I like to think that good journalism is not a thing of the past. I like to think that the web is where it’s going to be at for journalism for the foreseeable future. If the industry is serious about online and good online journalism, it needs to back that up with money.

Yes, yes, I understand the laws of supply and demand. I understand that there is lots of content online that is supplied for free or cheap. News organizations are floundering to identify a business plan that works in a drastically disrupted market, and it is money that news organizations are primarily after. Good journalism, in the list of priorities, comes in a distant second.

It seems to me, though, that this is a moment in which resolve is needed. A mentality shift is needed. Instead of outlets using the online-only status of a story as a reason to pay a reporter less, they should pay reporters an equal amount. If the work is of the same caliber, why not? It does, after all, cost less to publish on the web. This shift in pay and status seems to me an important part of the necessary industry shift. Major outlets — that’s right, New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker — should take the lead.

As I was curating TucsonCitizen.com’s Twitter feed during the State of the Union address last night, I noticed that President Barack Obama’s seemingly uncontroversial statement that women ought to receive pay equal to men coincided with a lot of Twitter chatter about women — three specific women, in fact.

One woman who was the subject of much discussion was Gabrielle Giffords. There were many tweets about how her hug with the president brought them to tears. There were also many tweets about how great she looks in red. There were a lot of tweets about the first lady, Michelle Obama, most of them about her crisp blue dress and later, about who designed it and how much it cost. There were several tweets about Hillary Clinton and her appearance – to what degree she had aged, the appeal of her outfit, the wisdom of wearing a headband.

This chatter, at least in the #SOTU feed as I observed it, far outweighed any substantial conversation about these women or their public role. In the context of Obama’s statement, I found it especially disturbing. It’s not that I am against observations of appearance or fashion. In high school, I aspired to be a fashion designer. I do think how one presents oneself is important. But the volume of the how-she-looks chatter struck me as a symptom of the larger problem: Women are still judged disproportionately by how they look, even accomplished women with important policy roles.

Sure, House Speaker John Boehner was the target of a fair amount of superficial chatter about the darkness of his tan and the color of his tie, but there was about an equal number of observations about his behavior, his policy positions and political strategy. The same was not true in regards to three of the high-profile women present that night.

For a broader look at the Twittersphere reaction, check out 10,000 Words’s State of the Union infographic.

The battle over whether Tucson Unified School District ought to allow students to enroll in a Mexican American studies course as anything but an elective has been simmering for months inside the legislative and judicial systems. Students and activists were stirred up about it, but few others seemed to pay all that close attention. But when TUSD’s board voted to end the Mexican American Studies program and began taking the books used to teach those courses out of classrooms, protest erupted.

TUSD denied that its reaction could be fairly characterized as banning books (in TUSD Governing Board President Mark Stegeman’s own words here). Nonetheless, people on the street were talking about what does or does not constitute a book ban, what is or isn’t American and what does or doesn’t spur learning. What was an Arizona issue of limited national interest became an issue that got the attention of people, especially literary people, across the country. Books, we all seem to agree, are important to learning. (Some would take it a step further and argue that they may be a key ingredient in surviving one’s childhood, to cultivating imagination and a sense of opportunity. I can attest that they were for me.)

Once the narrative that books and free speech are good and book bans are Orwellian got established, outrage spread. It was social media, which some describe as itself a threat to general literacy, that helped to fan the flames. Presente.org, which describes itself as a national organization to amplify the political voice of Latino communities, created an online petition, and it has been tweeted and retweeted with incredible speed. What real-world manifestation the social media indignation will take is to be seen. Here’s a small taste of what the feeds looked like today.