Self-promotion time: I'll be speaking at the St. Petersburg Times' Festival of Reading at 10 a.m. tomorrow, trying to explain the mess of noise that modern media seems to have become.

Do you feel that media is biased to the left or the right? Do you wonder why newspapers keep getting smaller and shorter staffed while charging you more? Do worry about radio stations which feature less local content every day?

If any of these questions pique your interest -- or anything I've written in this space or elsewhere moves you -- please stop by my talk at 10 a.m. Saturday in Davis Hall 105 at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus. Once there, you can hang out at the Festival of Reading, which is a paradise for book lovers -- featuring speeches by big-name authors such as Susan Orlean, Dennis Lehane, and my fellows critics Sean Daly, Steve Persall, Lennie Bennett and John Fleming.

Click here to see the day's full schedule:

   I'll also be appearing today on the Reporter's Roundtable organized by National Public Radio's News and Notes show. Each week, News and Notes gets together a different group of journalists -- often reporters of color -- dissecting the day's headlines.

This week, we'll be discussing Obama's recent gains in swing states, especially Florida; the long lines at early voting sites and what that may portend for Election Day and Alan Greenspan's admission yesterday that the current economic crisis shows some of his beliefs about the economy during his tenure as head of the Federal Reserve were dead wrong.

Click here to hear the discussion, which I should be conducting live at 1 p.m. EST.