Posted on Mon, May. 16, 2005    Philadelphia Inquirer


New blogs seek success in numbers
Money talks here, too.
By Daniel Rubin
Inquirer Staff Writer

It's buddy-up time in the blogosphere.

Last week saw the launch of the celebrity-rich Huffington Post, with Quincy Jones riffing on the King of Pop's pain, Bill Maher celebrating Bush and biodiesel fuel, and Gary Hart asking how long we'll be in Iraq.

More than 300 of what cyber-salonista Arianna Huffington calls "the most creative minds" of our country are bloviating on one blog.

Within weeks, they'll have to make room for the Pajama people, a federation of nearly 300 bloggers who represent all angles of the political spectrum, but are joined by a common desire: to share ad revenue.

As the lone wolves of Web logs search for economies of scale, newspapers, networks and magazines are launching blogs to shed their institutional tone, explore the virtues of singular voices and connect with readers.

"It's harmonic convergence," says Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor whose Instapundit site logs 130,000 visitors a day. "I'm not a blogger triumphalist. I don't think the New York Times will become a blog, but I think it will learn a lot from blogs."

Papers from Spokane, Wash., to Greensboro, N.C., have introduced blogs. An Inquirer blog, Blinq, begins today. The Philadelphia Daily News started Attytood in February. The New York Times could be next; its credibility committee concluded last week that a blog could give readers better access to source material and its staff.

The mainstream media - or MSM, as bloggers have tagged us - make mistakes that Reynolds says could have been fixed with five minutes of Googling. Bloggers, meanwhile, could avoid mistakes "by picking up a phone and calling someone" instead of just sitting back and repeating what they've read.

To Michael S. Malone, a high-tech writer for ABC News, blogging isn't just blooming - it's the next tech boom.

He has predicted that bloggers will join together to find savings and mainstream advertisers in order to draw investors and build businesses.

Some blogs will flourish, some will fail. If, as he figures, 20 percent of today's estimated 10 million blogs survive the next year and a half, that's 2 million winners. Of those, he predicts 80,000 could become viable businesses.

It's money that's pulling bloggers together, said Reynolds. "If all you care about is getting your message out and being read," he said, "you can stand alone."

On the other hand, media giants are finding that "blogs bring a personal voice to the table. If [an Inquirer blog] wants to compete, it's got to sound like you, not someone out of the Knight Ridder P.R. office." Knight Ridder owns The Inquirer.

That, he said, is why candidate blogs during the presidential election read so badly.

Pajama Media's Roger L. Simon, who wrote Woody Allen's Scenes from a Mall and the Moses Wine detective series, named his new organization after a remark by CNN's U.S. president Jonathan Klein, who derided the typical blogger as a guy "sitting in his living room in his pajamas."

With 290 affiliates signed up in two dozen countries so far, Pajamas Media will deliver more than a million monthly readers to advertisers, Simon says. If organized, bloggers are in position to beat understaffed news organizations that suffer from lack of language skills and local context, he says.

From headquarters in Los Angeles, he's trying to create an Associated Press of the blogosphere.

"When something of consequence happens on the ground, like [political change in] Beirut or Ukraine, the bloggers will already be on the ground. We'll send a video camera from Los Angeles, then upload the interviews, repackage them and sell that material. There will be blog correspondents everywhere in the globe."

Huffington's business plan, too, sounds a lot like old media. She has signed a contract with Tribune Media Services, which distributes her column, giving the syndicate the right to offer parts of the blog to newspapers and their Web sites.

Unlike the postings on the Web, those versions will be fact-checked and copy-edited for the syndicate.

Early reviews of the Huffington Post by the dead-tree media have tended toward the snarky.

"Judging from today's horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many," wrote Nikki Finke in the L.A. Weekly.

In the Los Angeles Times, media critic Tim Rutten voiced disappointment. "The notion of having knowledgeable commentators analyze breaking news in real time under one tent is a fairly exciting prospect. The design of this site could make that possible, if the news were, in fact, breaking and the commentators were, in fact, knowledgeable and up to the task."

Actually, the site did just that. At 3:19 p.m. last Monday, three hours after the verdict in the Philadelphia pay-to-play trial, commentator Michael Smerconish weighed in:

"Now I am waiting for the apologies from the long list of Democrats who, once upon a time, were quick to say that the investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia, was all about politics, not corruption."

Even before it launched, the Huffington Post took heat for its celebrity bloggers. A parody in the Guardian newspaper of Britain had Norman Mailer using the blog to ask how to get red wine stains out of the wool rug. Warren Beatty took the opportunity to announce his candidacy for president. It took Barry Diller to help get out the stain.