new websites

Next month Tucker Carlson, the Fox News commentator and one-time CNN “Crossfire” host, along with former Cheney aide Neil Patel, plans on launching The Daily Caller, an ambitious and well-funded conservative web site that Carlson says "will be defined by its reporting, by the new facts it adds." But he's going to have company. Andrew Breitbart, who's already made some dents in what he considers the "Democrat-media complex" in 2009, says he’s going to roll out his own site, Big Journalism, a few days earlier - designed, he says, to report stories that the mainstream media is either missing or willfully ignoring. And that’s not the only competition in the suddenly crowded realm of conservative media. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum launched NewMajority in early 2009—which later became Frum Forum—while news organizations like Fox News and the Washington Times have tried attracting conservative eyeballs with Fox Nation and TheConservatives.com, respectively. Meanwhile, sites popular with Republican activists, tea-party-goers and libertarians—like National Review’s The Corner, Townhall, RedState, HotAir, and Instapundit—continue to attract million of readers unhappy with the Obama administration. “Everyone sees an opening, and they’re all trying to fill it,” said Conn Carroll, assistant director for strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation. “In a year, I doubt all these same entities will exist. I’m sure some of them will. And the ones that win out will serve the movement better.” The surge in conservative media is partially the result of being in the opposition after eight years of the Bush administration. That was an impetus for liberal and left-wing sites such as Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, which made their names during the Bush administration and are now established enough to be building their own reporting staffs. Conservatives see them as models for their own plans to build online news organizations with a point of view. “There was more of a niche media on the right for many years, and then Huffington Post and TPM" — as Talking Point Memo is commonly referred to — "took it to a new professional level that in some ways kind of leapfrogged over what the conservatives were doing,” Carroll said. “Now, I think [conservatives] are reevaluating and responding to the market.”
Launched in 2005, Huffington Post is ranked by Technorati as the most influential site in the blogosphere. Looking at incoming links in analyzing “standing and influence in the blogosphere,” Technorati includes a half-dozen conservative sites in its Top 30: National Review’s The Corner (7); NewsBusters (14); Pajamas Media (17); Big Government (22); Michelle Malkin (26); and Power Line (29).
National Review stands out as the only 20th century conservative institution—a 54-year-old magazine—that has made such a leap into the 21st; indeed, Carroll said The Corner’s still the first place he goes each day to take the pulse of opinion on the right.
But Matt Lewis, a conservative commentator and Politics Daily columnist said that it’s liberal sites—whether doing original reporting or taking on more of an advocacy role— that have the ability to amplify stories into the mainstream media conversation. “I’ve been on TV shows and done cable hits where reporters think they have got me,” Lewis said. “Luckily, I’ve read TPM or Media Matters and know what they’re going to ask.” Lewis sees Carlson’s planned site as filling that niche for the right by building an audience within the Washington- New York media establishment, home to many of the nation’s top political journalists and television producers.
That said, Breitbart has managed to break into the news cycle from a basement office in his Los Angeles home. Within the first week of launching his site Big Government, its stories about ACORN got lots of attention from Fox's Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, but also received mention on NPR, and in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Big Government, according to Nielsen, measured just over 3.5 million page views and 785,000 unique visitors for October. In addition to the ACORN reporting that spurred investigations and forced the media to play catch-up, Big Government covers politics in a more decentralized way. (Indeed, there’s no D.C. bureau). Amidst blog posts more or less riffing off the news, there’s original reporting based on campaign records or leaked memos. Breitbart doesn’t yet pay writers, and his sites are self-financed—a feat made possible given the success of his aggregator, Breitbart.com, which is often linked via his old employer, The Drudge Report. Breitbart describes his perspective as Judeo-Christian and free-market, with an interest in fighting the cultural wars that he feels the left has been winning for 40 years. That was part of the impetus behind another site, Big Hollywood, which Nielsen says has just over three million page views, and 833,000 unique visitors. Breitbart, who was a co-developer of the Huffington Post, knows how to generate buzz online, and even uses his Twitter feed for a public battle with liberal media watchdog, Media Matters. “I’m 100 percent at war with those people,” he said. While Breitbart isn’t focused on having a Washington-based reporting staff with traditional jobs such as White House correspondent, he said he’s rooting for The Daily Call. Carlson, for his part, is reluctant to give to many details about his plans, except to say he’s working out of a downtown office with a staff of around 20 people, including reporter Jon Ward, hired from the Washington Times to cover the White House. Carlson, who received $3 million in seed money to launch from conservative businessman Foster Friess, according to paidContent.org, said he’s expecting online advertising to generate revenue, but it’s unclear, for The Daily Call or any other site, whether that source will be enough to fully fund a reporting staff. “You are not going to make money off of low-paying banner ads for a right-of-center site,” said Breitbart. “The idea is to create a market for this stuff.” Breitbart makes it clear he doesn’t think every conservative getting into new media is necessarily on the same team. In his view, conservatives such as Frum have a vastly different perspective, are “always on their best behavior” and serve a “dual purpose of attacking the conservative movement” for mainstream outlets. Frum describes FrumForm as less a journalistic enterprise than a “political operation” with a “political message,” and the site bills itself as being “dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement.” And while Frum welcomes more original reporting from the right, as a movement, he said “our first need is actually not more muckraking, but better policy understanding.” Frum’s site hasn’t grown at the same pace as Big Government, but has gained readers in recent months. Nielsen’s numbers, based on an estimate, counts 91,000 uniques and 131,000 page views. Frum said he’s waiting for a time when Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are out of the spotlight. “Our site is going to be ready when conservatives decide they want to do something else,” Frum said, adding that “if Tea Party conservatism is the way of the future, then I’m just wrong.” Conservative readers heading to Fox Nation might not share Frum’s pessimistic view of the Tea Party’s movement’s future. The site, which brings in traffic in part via FoxNews.com, aggregates both old and new media from a right-leaning perspective, often providing big headlines to stories on Tea Party activists. According to Nielsen, Fox Nation brought in 422,000 unique visitors with 7.3 million total page views in October. (A Fox spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Fox Nation). While it’s unclear what impact the nearly nine-month old site will have on the movement, Lewis said that one political insider told him that in a couple years, “the Republican primary is going to be fought at Fox Nation.” Building a site geared toward partisan readers can be good business, especially since it costs far less to aggregate news than to produce it with a sizeable reporting staff. Even as the Washington Times scales back its staff by as much as 40 percent, the newspaper announced this month that it was expanding TheConservatives.com, which officially launched just a few months ago. “Opinion journalism is pretty cheap,” said Glenn Reynolds, the libertarian behind the long-running, Instapundit. “My overhead is pretty low.” According to Nielsen, his site—which is now hosted on Pajamas Media—brought in 210,000 unique visitors in October, and 5.65 million total page views. Reynolds said he doesn’t buy the notion that only liberal sites have been doing original reporting over the years citing the work of independent journalists like Michael Yon and Michael J. Totten. The mainstream media “just assume that they saw it first on Josh Marshall’s blog,” Reynolds said. “It’s like people who didn’t watch Elvis and thought Pat Boone invented rock n’roll.” But Reynolds, like others who have proved successful in the right-of-center opinion world, welcome more original reporting outside the realm of the liberal blogosphere and mainstream media, to augment the large (and still growing) opinion category. For the conservative movement “to be viable, you need to have activist bloggers like [RedState’s] Erick Erickson, and opinion sites,” Lewis said. “The left needs Daily Kos, but they also need the Huffington Post.”
© 2009 Capitol News Company, LLC

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