All the News That's Fit to Blog

Who's doing this? Andrew Sullivan, for one. A columnist for the New Republic and the Sunday Times of London, Sullivan started andrewsullivan.com in the fall of 2000 and now routinely gets 25,000 to 30,000 site visits per day. When big news breaks out, visits to his site spike well above that. Sullivan's influence before he started blogging was measurable; since he started blogging, it has grown exponentially. New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum recently compared his work to that of George Orwell during the early days of World War II.

Another blogger is Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the Web site Tech Central Station. Reynolds (whose own site is called InstaPundit.Com) is known as the "all-powerful hit king" because he posts so often and, as a result, gets a ton of repeat visits. Yet another blogger is Mickey Kaus, author and Slate columnist, whose wry observations, savvy insights, and offbeat sidebars make kausfiles.com one of the best reads out there.

And there are many, many others. (For a good list, go to www.dynamist.com, where author, columnist, and blogger Virginia Postrel has links to the best of blog world.) What distinguishes bloggers in general is that they fit the new architecture. They link to anything and everything that they consider worth reading. A good story in the New York Times? Just click, and you're there. A good article in some godforsaken journal? Click, and you're there. Bloggers are not devoted to keeping you on their page. Their purpose is to take you to other places. They figure that if they do that well enough, you'll return to the peer group that they host.

What further distinguishes bloggers is their understanding of the peer communities that they serve. For one thing, bloggers assume that their readers are as smart as they are, if not smarter. What a refreshing notion! When they're not focused on themselves, mainstream journalists spend most of their time sucking up to sources and writing with a keen eye toward source protection. Bloggers spend most of their time engaged in constant communication with their readers. In so doing, they create a network of sources who are always on the lookout for interesting articles, columns, stories, and items. Reynolds, in particular, makes use of this jury-rigged stringer system to alert his readers to articles that would otherwise go unnoticed.

What amazes the mainstream media community about the bloggers is how quickly they've established themselves. Sullivan is without question the most influential print journalist in Washington today. Reynolds is fast becoming the table setter for what gets talked about on talk radio and TV chat shows. The list of bloggers worth reading gets longer by the month.

Most blogs don't make money, although kausfiles.com and InstaPundit.Com are (barely) profitable. But bloggers don't seem to care. They're not in it for the money, at least not directly. They're in it for the juice -- the rush of energy they get when one of their blog items moves the needle of public awareness.

Major news organizations breathed a huge sigh of relief when dotcom mania came crashing down. That meant that the barriers to entry in their markets were reerected and that their (mostly) monopoly positions were resecured. Now the bloggers are at the gates, eating into the media's value-added proposition. It's no small threat, because the peer-to-peer technology that underlies it is what the military calls a "force multiplier."