This week's work

We're going to focus on what happens when the pros, the people who are variously. "credentialed"by the preexisting media, try their hands at blogging. As I suggested,
James Wolcott is a good place to start, and so is Roger Ailes.
Eric Alterman was a little less well-established before he blogged, but he definitely had a career, as did Andrew Sullivan. Kyrie OÇonnor, who does MeMo (see my blogroll) was not famous, but a long-time working journalist (made much more famous partly as a result of blogging). Read her too. I'm going to ask you to go BACK to the Huffington Post, partly because it's full of credentialed people trying to blog. And there's this slightly puzzled refelction by a celebrity-turned-blogger.

Another thing I'm going to ask you to do is to read the work of more typical bloggers, often covering the same subjects. You can pick some of your own favorites, but try a smart Dem blog and this gay conservative less famous than Sullivan.
And then there's Wonkette, who's the best example of an overnight sensation.

As an index, I'm going to ask you to look, all week long, at how the blogosphere, including these blogs and others, treats the story of de-imprisoned Judith Miller. Almost all the blogs here, with the possible exceptions of Eve and MemMo, will look at this story; and it's a very elastic, protean meme in the sense that there is no real conventional wisdom about it as of this writing, except for the idea that we are not being told the whole story. The Huffington Post, at the moment, has a manic interest in it, especially Ariana. Watch it develop and flesh out over the next few days. If you're really ambitious, watch Sunday morning news shows and read the papers and note how conventional media are or are not reflective of or pushed along by the blogs. Look at how the blogs talk to one another.