Wednesday, November 23, 2005
FUTURE: Liberal blogger hiring two reporters for muckraking
Source: Josh Gerstein, The New York Sun
http://www.nysun.com/article/23381
As newspapers across America race to shrink the size of their news staffs,
a prominent liberal blogger is doing something virtually unheard of these
days: hiring new reporters. Over the weekend, the proprietor of
TalkingPointsMemo.com , Joshua Marshall, announced that he is seeking two
journalists to work for a new blog that will offer "wall-to-wall coverage
of corruption, self-dealing, and betrayals of the public trust in today's
Washington." In an interview, the blogger said he does not aspire to be an
Internet mogul, but simply seeks to fill a niche he sees in the
journalistic marketplace. "I'm never going to have the resources to
compete with the big papers," Mr. Marshall said. He said his new site will
be able to follow long simmering stories more consistently than mainstream
outlets do. "A scrappy blog can provide a different service. I think
there's a market out there for that," he said. Mr. Marshall, whose site
just marked its fifth anniversary, said he has spent the past six months
seeking to professionalize the sale of advertising. A standard
TalkingPointsMemo.com ad costs $500 a week through one ad-selling
consortium, BlogAds.com. A premium ad can cost up to four times as much.
"We've got a backlog of orders already for next year for the political
bloggers," the owner of BlogAds.com, Henry Copeland, said. "It's just
really clear these guys are moving from making good money to making great
money."
