About Blogs

Terry McDermott for the LA Times has a decent report on the nature of blogs. It's a relatively brief but fairly accurate general description. He calls particular (and well-deserved) attention to the journalistic successes of Josh Marshall and his ever-expanding TPM empire. He also gives a paragraph to Atrios: Duncan Black, an economist who writes as Atrios on his website, Eschaton, receives hundreds of comments for almost anything he posts. Thursday morning, he posted a short note saying he would not be writing much that day as he was going to be traveling. Within the hour, 492 people posted comments on that. A political reporter at a metropolitan daily might not get that much reader response in a year. Kinda goes a long way to explain why the Big Corporate Media dinosaurs are so cranky and clueless about the blog phenomenon.