The Google Alerts don't lie: Anderson Cooper continues as one of the lightning-rod media figures of the Hurricane Katrina coverage, garnering a slew of stories and even his very own backlash. In today's New York Times, Elizabeth Jensen has kind words for his almost "advocacy journalism," saying his "heart-on-his-sleeve demeanor has been anything but slick and packaged" and giving Jon Klein an opporutnity to step in ecstatically and proclaim Anderson "the anchorperson of the future," (aka the "anti-anchorperson" -- who thinks that one will come back to bite him? Knowing Jon Klein...). New York Magazine, meanwhile, has an extensive feature by Jonathan Van Meter in which he calls Anderson's post-Katrina meltdown (emotion + hauling off on politicos) a breakthrough in TV news (in this article Anderson actually chokes up on the phone and has to resume the call later). Over at MarketWatch, Jon Friedman isn't as convinced; he says nobody "owns" this story and that there hasn't been a defining moment that belongs to one anchor. The closest it comes for him, he says, is two anchors: FNC's Shep Smith and, of course, Anderson (yet he cites Anderson's dressing down of Senator Mary Landrieu and doesn't have a similar moment for Shep -- what sort of defining moment were you looking for, Jon? 'Cause when it comes to the post-Katrina media backbone renaissance, this sort of seems to be it)(NB from TVNewser: Shep's last rated broadcast beat Anderson by more than a million viewers). Finally, in the inevitable backlash, dare-to-be-different Franklin Foer rolls his eyes at Anderson's self-conscious theatrics in The New Republic, noting that he'll shut the cameras off when he gets choked up -- but will broadcast up to that point. dismissing him as "a Yale-educated Geraldo Rivera."

There's more -- in Variety, in the LAT, in scores of regional papers, and he's still a healthy tag on Technorati (though knocked out of the top searches by another sleek little plaything, the iPod Nano). If my Google Alerts are any indication, there is much more to come. It should be interesting to see where Anderson goes from here. A few less Oprah appearances and a few more co-anchor gigs with Aaron Brown and who knows where we may see Anderson next. I'm betting that at least from this point on, it won't be Maxim.