Tuesday, August 7, 2007
News / Chicagoland Your world frightens and confuses me
Posted by Whet Moser on 08.07.07 at 09:40 PM
The Tribune editorial page gets surprised by a strange modern invention:
"We might as well admit it up front: The first time we heard of the liberal blogging network known as Daily Kos was when Bill O'Reilly dissed it on his show."
Yes, that would be the liberal blogging network with a readership that's probably bigger than the Tribune's.
You can't expect Ma and Pa Old Media to be hep to every single popular page on the Web, and say what you will about the quality of DKos, but to admit to never having heard of it is an admission of truly staggering ignorance about the political world and of a general, gross incompetence. Would you trust a Web editor who's never heard of Google? A sportswriter who didn't know what steroids were? How can you trust an editorial board that hadn't heard of what's arguably the most powerful part of the "netroots" on either side of the political spectrum, given that the rise of Internet activism is the most important change in the body politic over the past decade? Even on just a purely Darwinian know-your-enemy level, the Trib's editorial staff should probably be aware that sites like DKos, Instapundit, Eschaton, michellemalkin.com, Hullabaloo, Firedoglake, RedState, the Huffington Post, and many, many others like them are making dim-bulb newspaper editorial boards totally irrelevant.
Sites like DKos are big, important, and on the radar of virtually every significant news and political publication in the country, and yet, unless they're making a funny, the entire staff of the Tribune editorial page is not ashamed to be totally oblivious to it (but not, unfortunately, to a meathead carnival barker like O'Reilly).
I don't even know what to say. If I was Ann Marie Lipinski I'd be throwing a paperweight through a wall right now. Steve Rhodes has more.
Comments (6)
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Well in terms of people, looks like the Trib is way bigger -- and gaining: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dailykos.com+chicagotribune.com?metric=uv But if one measure of influence has to do with how much time peole spend on a site, Daily Kos seems to be ahead: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dailykos.com+chicagotribune.com?metric=uv
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Second link *should* have been: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dailykos.com+chicagotribune.com?metric=avgStay
Woweezowee. Could it be a case of the Trib trying to minimize the prominence of Kos by falsely claiming that they never heard of him??? "We're so big, we don't pay attention to these little guys". Or is it just frank, innocent, and very telling insight into their media consumption patterns?
They're either being disingenuous or don't bother reading their own paper, in which DKos has in fact been mentioned before, e.g.: http://tinyurl.com/727vh So who's gonna burst their bubble regarding Copernicus and the whole heliocentric thing?
