Liberal Blogger Hires Two Journalists

As newspapers across America race to shrink the size of their news staffs, a prominent liberal blogger is doing something virtually unheard of these days: hiring new reporters.Over the weekend, the proprietor of TalkingPointsMemo.com, Joshua Marshall, announced that he is seeking two journalists to work for a new blog that will offer “wall-to-wall coverage of corruption, self-dealing, and betrayals of the public trust in today’s Washington.”In an interview, the blogger said he does not aspire to be an Internet mogul, but simply seeks to fill a niche he sees in the journalistic marketplace.“I’m never going to have the resources to compete with the big papers,” Mr. Marshall said. He said his new site will be able to follow long simmering stories more consistently than mainstream outlets do. “A scrappy blog can provide a different service. I think there’s a market out there for that,” he said.Mr. Marshall, whose site just marked its fifth anniversary, said he has spent the past six months seeking to professionalize the sale of advertising. A standard TalkingPointsMemo.com ad costs $500 a week through one ad-selling consortium, BlogAds.com. A premium ad can cost up to four times as much.“We’ve got a backlog of orders already for next year for the political bloggers,” the owner of BlogAds.com, Henry Copeland, said. “It’s just really clear these guys are moving from making good money to making great money.”Mr. Copeland said yesterday that he views Mr. Marshall’s move as yet another milestone for the blogging phenomenon.” The New York Times has shrunk its staff 5% over the past year. Here’s somebody who’s tripling his staff,” Mr. Copeland said. “That’s a real shocking kind of inflection point.”Not all of Mr. Marshall’s revenue is derived from advertising. Earlier this year, he conducted an online fundraiser to hire his first staffer, an editor and manager of online discussions. He is continuing to raise money for a “muckraking” fund to help support the expanded reporting efforts.“It’s exciting to me as a journalist,” Mr. Marshall said. “There’s this very broad movement out of paper publication to electronic media and particularly the Web. And we’re lucky enough to be on the right side of the divide.”In recent months, several independent bloggers with significant followings have chosen to affiliate with larger news organizations. A successful conservative blogger, Andrew Sullivan, announced last week that he will move to Time Magazine’s Web site as part of a deal he described as “a lease, not a sale.” Mr. Marshall’s latest salvo suggests he intends to remain independent for some time.

Liberal Blogger Hires Two Journalists

Liberal Blogger Hires Two Journalists

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