The very funniest thing about this is how stupid he sounds refering to Mother Jones as "mainstream media", as if being printed on paper is the criteria for membership in the mainstream. It is that kind of knee jerk net-fascism that makes it so difficult for those bloggers doing real journalism. Dont research, dont read, dont interview or fact check. Just publish whatever you like and then get your back up and start throwing blind punches at your friends when they ask you to be more responsible for your actions.

Josh--
Take a deep breath and count to 10, ok? There's no need to suggest that Alan Rosenblatt is a "fucking dumbass." Mighty thin-skinned of you.
You're right that MoJo's cover package isn't just about blogs and blogging. That said, of the four pieces you feature, the one about the netroots bloggers is probably the most significant of your package. Certainly it's gotten the most attention.
Speaking of which, here's my two cents on that piece. I think MoJo is fundamentally wrong in thinking that people like Kos are the new "bosses" or "gatekeepers." There are no gatekeepers anymore. Yes, the progressive blogosphere is more white and male than the general population, but it's more diverse and open to new voices than, say, the editorial board of Mother Jones or any other progressive print publication! Welcome to the pool, the water's fine.
Micah Sifry
Editor
TechPresident.com

Micah--
Glad we got your attention. I think you raise good points about the "gatekeepers" piece that are worth discussing. It would have been nice if you guys could have discussed them in Techpresident instead of platitudes about print hacks. And by the way, I did take a deep breath and count to ten, and then I felt much better about what I wrote.
Josh Harkinson
Reporter
Mother Jones

Micah,

Of course there are gatekeepers and bosses just not in the traditional sense of the words. The fact that Kos or techpresident are more visible and talked about taken together with the echo chamber effect makes what you say or what Kos says the blog counterpart to an AP or UPI wire service story in the 1970s.

Certainly, Im sure that it is easier to get a story or point of view covered in techpresident than in Mother Jones. However this should not be seen as automatically a bad thing. Mother Jones is trusted because it has a reputation as being trustworthy. It has a reputation for being honest and fair and doing research and checking facts. Keeping that reputation means keeping bad writers, bad writers and 'bad facts' out of stories. This means setting a bar that is higher than most people can hit. Exceptional journalism is not the product of an open door editorial policy. In fact the two are mutually exclusive. If anyone that walked through the door was capable of exceptional journalism then there would be more of it. :-)

I meant for the line to be:
Keeping that reputation means keeping bad STORIES, bad writers and 'bad facts' OUT OF THE MAGAZINE.

Josh, I'm glad you feel better about being obnoxious. That makes one of us.

Brian, gimme a break. Your piece is titled "Meet the New Bosses" and its subtitle is "After crashing the gate of the political establishment, bloggers are looking more like the next gatekeepers." [Emphasis added.] The illustration you ran along with the story online shows a couple of guys smoking cigars leaning over someone sitting at their computer terminal. Looks a lot like you are using the traditional sense of those words.

It gets worse. You study a few trees and decide that you can describe a forest. You write: "Today, top liberal bloggers have become an elite in their own right—one that is increasingly part of the political hierarchy." Which elite? Which political hierarchy? The one that works on political campaigns? You've got about a dozen (at most) people named in your piece who have gone from blogging into campaigns (which hardly makes them an "elite"). I can name literally dozens of top liberal bloggers who are nowhere close to the political establishment, in fact just scanning the handy blog-roll to the left of this blog post many of them are there.

Yes, there are a few high-visibility political blogs that the politicians have started courting, like Kos, but that hardly makes him a political boss. Sure, he's got a major platform (umm, which he built from scratch, unlike all the major platforms of the old print world of opinion journalism, which typically have been honorably financed by big money from somebody's trust fund) but unlike true bosses, he is highly accountable to the community of readers that have congregated on his site. Also, you may not have noticed but Kos writes about 1% of the total daily content of his site and probably only about 20% of the posts that get featured on his main page. DailyKos is hardly one person's fiefdom; it's a sophisticated grass-roots collaboration engine that, working in tandem with a network of volunteer editors and other blogs, sifts the news and acts like a giant switching-station, connecting people to causes and actions with great effectiveness. People become front-page editors of DailyKos not because they went to the right school or their Daddy gave Markos some perk, they rise to the top largely on merit and on the votes of the community. Man, if that is elitism let's have more of it!

You have one on-the-record source attacking Kos and other "elite" bloggers for running a "Skull and Bones" like email list. That hardly is proof of anything in my mind. You have several examples of blogger conflict-of-interest or "sock-puppet" incidents, but interestingly enough the only ones of significance, where the blogger in question failed to disclose their conflict, are on the Republican side. (Same with the Danny Glover story that you cite; he was rightfully slammed by yours truly and others for his unfair interpretation of the facts, and for tarring all political bloggers with the sins of a few Republicans.) Yet your piece, from its title down to its snarky tone, is an indictment of all progressive bloggers!

This isn't to say that there aren't some important issues of merit raised by your story. I agree that some political bloggers ought to be more open about their motives and the few that are first and foremost political operatives should be seen as such. But in those cases, the reason to question if you can trust them isn't because they're bloggers, it's because they're operatives! Instead of grasping this distinction, you paint with too broad a brush.

Finally, I humbly want to suggest that your attitude towards online journalism and blogging could use an update. The methods and values of print journalism are being upended online because this is a world of abundance, not scarcity. There are gatekeepers in print journalism because you don't have room to publish everything and let readers sift to pull the best quality stuff to the top, but online this is the cumulative effect of the blogosphere. Go take a look at what Dan Gillmor has to say about how his readers are wiser than him, and give Yochai Benkler's book "The Wealthy of Networks" a close reading. Then let's talk.

Micah

You have a lovely magazine and I am enjoying your Politics 2.0 collection very much. I have read just about all of it and love the interplay between the diferent interviews around the featured articles. Am I a dumbass? It wouldn't be the first time I have been called that.

I know I am a slow reader, but I try to make up for it by reading often and inserting humor and clever wordplay in my writings to disguise my gaps. And while I blog, I still don't really see myself as a blogger. After all, if there really are 70 million blogs in the world, what does it really mean to be a blogger?

To be honest, I am tickled you read my piece. And sorry you took it so hard. I thought there were lots of nuggets of insight throughout your series of articles. But your netroots article touched a tender spot that has nothing to do with Mother Jones and I felt the need to raise my concerns that all of us tend to get distracted from the big strategy picture by all the shiny tools.

My colleagues' concerns about the relative emphasis of the netroots article compared to the others is a good one, and it relates to my larger concern. We need to stop talking about the internet like its going to deliver a silver bullet. It is a new place for people to communicate with each other in more ways than we have yet to imagine. So we need to think about how all these tools work together to change the dynamic of politics (Micah once said we should talk more about listening to voters instead of manipulating them... that has stuck with me).

The internet has delivered new killer apps for the past few cycles, from online fundraising, to meetups, to blogs, to youtube, there will always be a new tool out there. I think we tend to talk too much about particular tools, like blogs, and not enough about how all the parts fit together, from organizing the back end of a campaign, to facilitating civic engagement, to how the media covers it.

So while it is great that you have all the different articles about different things, like fundraising, and event organizing, and community building, etc., I would love to hear more about how all those things interact with each other.

In any event, I figured after I butchered Star Trek and the Sex Pistols, nobody would take my screed too personally. We both seem to be interested in better understanding how this is all developing, so I hope we can bury the virtual hatchet (anywhere you want) and continue this conversation for a few years.

(And I get the irony of calling Mother Jone MSM... don'tcha just love it?)

PS If Rush Limbaugh can claim his is a comedy show, I can too.

Micah,

I think you have me confused with someone that had anything to do at all with the Mother Jones articles you are talking about. The opinion I gave in my comment was my own and I stand by it. I noticed that you made no effort to respond to anything I really said. You decided to continue to go after MJs articles. As I said before there are 'bosses' just not in the same sense as you are using the word. They are bosses like the AP and UPI wires were bosses in their hayday. They are respected and repeated enough times that their opinions and statements become fact regardless of their quality. Any comment on that idea?

Alan,
The context of your reference to MJ as being mainstream did not seem to be comedic. I think it shows an underlying thought process that anything in print is old school and therefore to be attacked as the four letter version of the word mainstream. The irony gets darker when taken in the context of comments that state that blogs like techpresident are more open and inclusive.

For further irony please refer to the idea that one techpresident rep is touting the journalistic ideal to be found in blogs like his while the other techpresident rep is justifying his actions by pointing to what Rush Limbaugh does. :-)

Micah,
One last thing I forgot to include above: Im not sure I agree with your characterization that gatekeepers only exist in print media as a result of limited space. For sure there are good articles that dont make it into the print edition for space reasons but with the advent of print media having websites for 4 or 5 years now if they are really good then they likely make it online if not in print. Gatekeepers exist in much larger part for reasons of quality. Im certainly not suggesting that there are these kinds of gatekeepers in the blogosphere. That is obviously not true in the traditional sense. However, sometimes I wish there were. The endless quantity of new bloggers and the every lowering bar for entering that world, certainly does mean that there will be, by the law of averages, a higher number of quality voices 'out there.' But that same low bar means that any idiot with a computer can toss his poop at the visitors of the blog-zoo. So the trouble now is how does the average user of the internet figure out which ones are worth reading since we cannot read them all. How? We look at the blogrolls of those we trust, like Kos, like techpresident, etc. This makes them the defacto gatekeepers. Again, not in the same sense as the gatekeepers of the old school media but gatekeepers in their net effect.

(Again, I dont work for MJ and I understand that my thoughts here may be out of synch with the MJ story) ;-)

The issue of how the bogosphere creates new gatekeepers has been extensively analyzed - here are a few of my favorite articles on the topic (please note, self-provingly, you've probably never heard of them ...)
Jon Garfunkel: "The New Gatekeepers"
http://civilities.net/TheNewGatekeepers

Nick Carr: "The Great Unread"
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/08/the_great_unrea.php

Shelley Powers: "Guys Don't Link"
http://burningbird.net/connecting/guys-dont-link/

The Nick Carr piece is notable for an extended discussion in the comments between him and a media A-lister who starts out flaming about how Nick is attacking strawmen, and gets thoroughly rebutted.

Brian--

Woops! Yup, I did confuse you with Daniel Schulman, who wrote that article. No idea how I did that! Sorry.

As for the question of gatekeepers, yes, obviously, I am the editor of TechPresident and thus do keep an eye on what our bloggers post, and try to garden the comments that people post to keep the conversation civil. You can't come and put a post up on our site at will.

But I still think that the gatekeeper role is almost meaningless in a world that is so open. As I just wrote in a comment on Jay Rosen's post about Mother Jones' Politics 2.0 package:

The definition of a gatekeeper is someone who keeps other people out of a room, or in this case a conversation. When anyone with access to the internet can join the conversation, in what sense do we still have gatekeepers? Phil de Vellis made a video, put it on YouTube, and we the people who make up the social web, or what my hero Yochai Benkler calls "the networked public sphere" spread Phil's video for him, to the point where 300,000+ people had viewed it before a single old media journalist decided to cover it.

One can argue that when you go from a world with one "Great Mentioner" (Russell Baker's term for the makers of conventional wisdom in Washington punditry) to a world of the Gang of 500 (Mark Halperin's updated version of the press pack) to a world where something like 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 political bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers sift the day's news and opinion and bubble up the most interesting stuff from obscure sites onto the big hub sites, that we just now have 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 gatekeepers instead of one or 500. But when you have a world with thousands of "gatekeepers" and new ones rising all the time, it sounds like such a porous (and gloriously democratic) system that the word "gatekeeper" scarcely seems appropriate anymore.

Micah,

I agree with your point, to a point. You are still thinking of gatekeeper in the traditional sense. I think that the lowering of the enterance requirements (easier to get your voice out to the masses) has, as you say, rendered the traditional gatekeeper concept not only useless but nonexistent as well. What Im talking about is idea that the daunting flood of blog entries you get when you google search ANYTHING and the vast sea of crappy blogs out there means that the few very well trusted ones become the blog worlds closest thing to an old school gatekeeer. You would blogroll a crappy, poorly written blog and neither would Kos or any of the other most highly visisble and trusted political blogs (or any other type of blog for that matter including mine about Microsoft Project Server and project management!) Getting on your blogroll or the blogroll of DailyKos MEANS SOMETHING. It means that you or Kos likes the blog. That carries weight and it brings what Im sure is a huge boost in readership potential. NOT being on such a blogroll does not mean your voice is silenced. But it does mean it is MUCH harder to get heard and trusted. So no you are not a gatekeeper of old, you are just the new version.

Crap! Correction:
You would NOT blogroll a crappy, poorly wirtten blog..."

Friends dont let friend post comments when tired. :-)

Alan,

Thanks for your thoughtful response, and please do consider the virtual hatchet buried. For the record, I was not saying you are a "dumbass," nor do I think you are one. I was saying that your particular post was befitting a dumbass, but I too have written things too hastily and then been called a dumbass with good cause. We can agree to disagree on the accuracy of the way you characterized our stories. My goal here, in whacking the beehive, was to start a dialogue about some of the issues that you and Micah have been raising in the comments here. I was frustrated that, after the time and effort that we put into this, Techpresident hasn't been discussing them. Those things seem to me to be much more worthy of discussion than the misbegotten idea that we are obsessed with bloggers. So my challenge to you is: why don't you talk about those things in Techpresident?
As I mentioned before, I am generally a big fan of the blog. I think your instincts to question what we do are good ones, and I'm looking forward to reading your stuff down the line.

Alan, Brian, and Micah (hi Micah!), thanks for your thoughtful comments, and I mean that. You're engaging this thing on the merits, and if you like or dislike it on that basis, that's exactly the kind of discussion we were hoping to foster--or to illuminate, really, since we make no pretense to having originated the debate over politics 2.0 promise and peril. That's an argument that has been going on online, quite vigorously, for some time.

And of course you're all welcome to question our motives, vested interests, etc. What puzzles me a little bit is this sense that Mother Jones is in some way apart from, or new to, online journalism. (We're in San Francisco, for chrissakes!) We had the very first website of any national magazine (back in 1993), as well as one of the first political blogs (Peter Coyote's dispatches from the 1996 Dem convention are still online somewhere if you dig deep enough, not to mention our "Bush Files" blog back in 2000/2001.) We were doing original journalism on the web when most people were still calling it cyberspace and we're in the middle of a major expansion in this area, with a six-person Washington bureau opening in a couple of weeks as part of an effort to reimagine the way journalism is done BOTH in print and online. We have nothing to fear from the medium; we're part of it, and happily so. But just as we will shine a critical spotlight on Democrats and progressives--no matter whether we share many of their values--we'll be skeptical and critical in this universe. We make no claim to having the answers, but we believe asking questions is almost always good.

Let me just quote the intro to our package, which pretty much sums up both our enthusiasm and our skepticism: "Open-source politics has the potential to fundamentally change the way we govern ourselves--to fulfill the democratic promise that Web 1.0 pioneers dreamed of before they grabbed for the IPO brass ring. It also has the potential to become exactly what Web 1.0 turned into—a delivery system where most of us are mere customers. To get a sense of what's hype and what's real, we surveyed bloggers, politicos, and all manner of netizens."

MoJo Editor Clara Jeffery here. Guys, let's try and bring back some measure of civility to this conversation. I think Josh was upset to see a lot of hard work, careful reporting, and what I honestly think was a better faith effort than has been done anywhere before to present the range of people's opinions and let them speak for themselves, be reduced to the same old talking point of: old media just doesn't get it.

As to Micah's many artful posts: I respect your desire to want the blogosphere/netroots/whathaveyou to be a pure meritocracy, but I think it's naive to think that it is one.

As with any other profession, some (and by no means all) people get ahead by doing favors and kissing ass (the quickest way a mid-list blogger can rise in popularity is by extolling the wisdom of someone higher up the food chain), some by tearing people down just to increase their own popularity (no different, really, than a Bill O'Reilly), and certainly, in places, the blogosphere suffers from the kind of intellectual laziness that wraps any incident/statement around a preexisting talking point to boost one's exposure or veneer of expertise. Something that old-school print columnists suffer from as well.

One factual point I feel needs clarification. Micah writes: "You have several examples of blogger conflict-of-interest or "sock-puppet" incidents, but interestingly enough the only ones of significance, where the blogger in question failed to disclose their conflict, are on the Republican side. Same with the Danny Glover story that you cite; he was rightfully slammed by yours truly and others for his unfair interpretation of the facts, and for tarring all political bloggers with the sins of a few Republicans."

Actually, no. Danny Glover's piece [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/03/opinion/03opchart.gif] that ran in the NYT Times has examples of bloggers on BOTH sides of the aisle taking contributions from campaigns or consulting for them without disclosing it to readers. Our story updated the list, and rest assured we did and will report on such conflicts of error and what I hope we can all agree are true lapses in "blogger ethics" when and where we find them, no matter party affiliation or political inclination.

As to the Nation's slush pile. I feel your pain, we've all been there, but without adding more fuel to the who/how many gatekeepers issue, let's be honest. I've worked at a lot of publications and the problem with the slush pile was never: oh my god, here's something brilliant that I, smart young intern/editor found, and my higher-ups just won't read/publish it. The problem is that most of it is total crap. If only there was a diamond for every 100 lumps of coal. If the Nation's slush pile was somehow a treasure trove during your tenure there Micah, you are indeed blessed.

Finally, Micah and Alan, I love TechPresident. So keep up the good work.

I think that's an unbelievably cynical, condescending thing to say! I wouldn't say the print world is doing such a great job, even the so-called newspapers of record that bent down and coughed when the President said to go to war. Why do you think alternatives popped up? Why did MoJo pop up as an alternative to the mainstream thinking? Everyone's corruptible and some of those practices can happen; as you say, it can happen anywhere. But to just dismiss an entire realm of communication as somehow incapable of behaving like a meritocracy DOES show you don't get it.

Man,

I read Alan's blog post, and then I read yours.

I don't think you are a "fucking dumbass" - but you certainly sound like a dick.

Monika and Clara--Glad to see you wading in. I am sorry that I can't really engage in depth right now; I'm in Israel on the second day of a weeklong trip, speaking a conference the next two days and then doing some R&R with family.
I have one quick query for Clara: Please name the Democratic bloggers who failed to disclose their relationships with campaigns. I wrote a lengthy critique of Danny Glover's NYT oped, which I think was unfair to many bloggers, here: http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/1115. If you updated his list, and found some Dems to add to the Republican examples he cites, I missed that.
Micah
p.s. I don't argue that the blogosphere is a "pure meritocracy." I say that it is more meritocratic than print journalism.

Micah, serious question - does there exist any *reasonable* evidence that you would accept as disproof of your claims? I've seen these arguments so many times, e.g. one which I call "BEST LOTTERY EVER". That is, whenever someone points out that the bogosphere is a hugely unequal playing field, with a very small oligarchy of power, and a vast near-powerless audience, the evangelist says "But it's the BEST LOTTERY EVER" - deflecting attention from the fact that the odds of winning are *miniscule*. I mean, who cares if it goes from one in a million to two in a million? One could make the marketing claim that that's "twice as good" - but it's also essentially the same.

If it's shown that, for a given level of attention, the bogosphere is significantly more white-male than print journalism, would you still maintain it's more meritocratic? See the problem there?

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