What a way to end the year: one of my favorite blogs (and Minnesota boys, no less), Power Line, is named "Blog of the Year" by Time Magazine. Due to their role in both RatherGate and the Swift Boat Vets controversy, bloggers have become part of the media landscape and its good to see that acknowledged by the mainstream press, which should view blogging as a complementary, not adversarial medium.
Scott Johnson ("The Big Trunk"), John Hinderaker ("Rocket Man") and Paul Mirengoff ("Deacon") run a first-class site, and for more than two years I have made Power Line a daily read for its insightful commentary from a conservative perspective. Even if you are a liberal (especially if you're a liberal!), you will want to make Power Line a regular stop to understand how the other side views the world and frames its arguments - you might even find yourself persuaded. I know I have been on more than one occasion.
Congratulations to Power Line (along with Little Green Footballs, INDC Journal, Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt, and many others) whose role in the CBS document scandal demonstrated the power and collective intelligence of this medium.
UPDATE: James Lileks puts in his two cents:
Full disclosure: This writer knows the Power Line guys, and has a Web site of his own. Good thing, too; the Internet is going to make gigs like this obsolete, once enough people realize that some guy in his basement is capable of turning out commentary as insightful as a tenured eminence who was handed a column 30 years ago and has spent the last 10 coasting on a scoop from the Reagan years. It takes dynamite to get some writers out of the paper.
In the new media, however, a clever blog can spring up overnight and get 100,000 readers in a day. That number can quickly fall to zero if the blogger gets a terminal case of the stupids.
What's more, if the blog allows comments, the readers can grapple with the writer on the very blog itself, which is like a columnist standing outside the newspaper building 24/7, arguing with anyone with a gripe. This is new. Bloggers question authority, as the beloved college T-shirt slogan has it. Isn't that good?
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