Trip’s morning reading

Here’s a summary of what I’m reading this morning. Every state is swimming under a tide of new applications for food stamps, the federal program that helps the low-income with food purchases. New Mexico isn’t an exception. But one state over, Texas is at risk of losing federal food stamp money due to a high error rate and failure to process applications in a timely manner and. A federal official has suggested the nation’s second most populous state should hire a food stamp czar to correct the significant problems, reports the Austin American-Statesman.

Meanwhile, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland has postponed two executions following last month’s failed execution of a prisoner sentenced to death, the New York Times reports. Technicians at a state prison on Sept. 15 tried but failed for over two hours to maintain an intravenous connection in order to inject Romell Broom with lethal drugs. Broom had been convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of a teenage girl in 1984, the paper reports.

The Chicago Sun-Times appears one step closer to being bought by a Second City financier. No second bidder stepped in Monday to challenge Jim Tyree, who has offered $5 million in cash and a willingness to take on $22 million in debt for The Sun-Times and 58 suburban publications, Editor & Publisher reports. Monday was the deadline for bids. Tyree’s takeover hinges on labor concessions though, and he has given an ultimatum to the unions that represent Sun-Times employees, but either have not voted or have rejected concessions, to get on board by Thursday. The concessions include making permanent the temporary 15 percent pay cuts and dramatic changes in work and seniority rules, E&P reports.

The geeks — and I use that word with utmost respect and awe — over at ReadWriteWeb offer a review on a new social networking site launching today. It’s called Spiffbox, and it comes with a gimmick. It pays, literally. “Every action you take on the site including responding to emails, chats, friend invites and sharing photos, will earn you points which can then be redeemed for cold, hard cash,” writes ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez. Perez has a mixed view of the idea. “While we have to give Spiffbox credit for thinking outside the box on this one, the idea of paying you to socialize has us feeling a little sour,” she says. Later, she adds, “What Spiffbox needs to remember is that all the popular social networks caught on – without bribes, mind you – because they were offering something unique and interesting.”

Google is shooting to become a $100 billion company, twice as large as Time Warner or Walt Disney. That’s the headline, and hang-together quote, in TechCrunch’s review of Ken Auletta’s forthcoming book, Googled. The aspirational quote is attributed to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, and no doubt it will send temblors through the media firmament, given the current tension between the little-search-engine-that-could and most of the media world, which frets that Google has helped to destroy a business model that worked for more than a century.  Auletta is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and Auletta, in TechCrunch’s view, has a pre-occupation with the media side of this potentially epic battle. The review is worth a read, if only to get a sense of where things stand in the standoff between Google and the media world.

Hmm. Your blogger friend is seemingly touting a product, and you trust his or her judgment on all matters of style, utility and, well, general coolness. Soon your friend will have to disclose whether the product was a freebie, according to a story from Wired Magazine about rules from The Federal Trade Commission to “make word-of-mouth endorsements on the net easier to believe.”