In the last few years, the number of independent Internet writers, or bloggers, has exploded. Their impact is increasingly felt.
Bloggers
Owen Robinson and James Wigderson now write newspaper columns (both write for papers owned by Conley Media, which includes the Waukesha Freeman and West Bend Daily News). Along with liberal Jay Bullock of the blog folkbum, they’re also used by local television stations to comment on election results. And newspapers like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are rushing to join them with blogs by staffers and outsiders. The JS also uses bloggers as columnists for its chain of Now suburban weeklies.
Bloggers also have become media watchdogs. Take the firing of conservative WTMJ-AM radio host
Jessica McBride in mid-May. McBride had conducted a mock “interview” of JS columnist Eugene Kane where she played tape of a squawking chicken to stand in for Kane (who declined her interview request) in response to questions about inner city crime and the shooting death of 4-year-old Jasmine Owens.
By the next day, former reporter
Jim Rowen had posted a comment headlined “McBride Mocks the Death of a Child” on his blog, The Political Environment, and linked to a podcast of the segment. Other liberal bloggers jumped on the story, followed by JS media columnist Tim Cuprisin. By the weekend, McBride was gone from TMJ, to be replaced by syndicated host Dennis Miller.
Jon Schweitzer
, TMJ’s general manager, tells Pressroom he wasn’t aware of the blogosphere hubbub and says a TMJ staffer told him about McBride’s podcast. But was the staffer responding to external criticism? Schweitzer insists all the decisions he made were uninfluenced by outsiders. “We decided it (the podcast) was best off not being on the Web site.” Schweitzer also says the decision to fire McBride had been planned already and the chicken segment simply sped up the timeline.
From the other end of the political spectrum, the conservative
BadgerBlogger scored a hit on “The Word Warriors” host Mike McGee (Sr.) of WNOV-AM. McGee did a program where he spoke dismissively of the death of Charlie Sykes’ mother in a house fire. BadgerBlogger proprietor Patrick Dorwin, a 38-year-old paratransit driver who lives on Milwaukee’s Northwest Side, had been taping and posting some of McGee’s more outrageous on-air rants for some time. He soon had a recording of the offending radio bit on his Web site. Word quickly spread, Cuprisin tossed an item in his JS column the next day, and within 24 hours, NOV owner Jerrell Jones had suspended McGee indefinitely – even though the former alderman buys his airtime and isn’t an NOV employee.
Initially, most bloggers operated from the right wing, but no longer. McBride launched her blog a few years ago as a conservative critique of the media, and she’s since been joined on the left by people who often make her a target. Writer
Mike Mathias and his wife Anne started Pundit Nation last year, motivated in part by the way Journal Communications controls not only the daily newspaper but also leading broadcast outlets. “A narrative that’s dominated by one media source, the Journal Sentinel, is a terribly interesting thing to deconstruct,” Mike Mathias says.
From a similar ideological vantage point, the anonymous author of
Brew City Brawler (who would be interviewed only by e-mail) founded his blog to rebut conservative pundits, Republican politicians, and Journal Sentinel stories he considers biased.
Bloggers have played a role in boosting other stories. A blog entry attacking University of Wisconsin lecturer
Kevin Barrett’s conspiracy theories on 9/11 led McBride to interview Barrett on her radio show and subsequent coverage by newspapers across the state. When Democratic strategy memos turned up on a state capitol copier last October, the first person to report it was Robinson in his Boots and Sabers blog. When the Journal Sentinel covered the story two days later, the newspaper linked to a PDF of one of the memos that Robinson had posted, but didn’t credit him.
JS
investigative columnist Daniel Bice has sometimes used blogs as tip sheets. When he wrote a column about Republican Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner’s No. 1 rank among members of Congress for accepting free junkets around the world, Bice added an account of Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore’s trip to London. Bice saw a reference to Moore’s jaunt on a blog and then confirmed the details and got comments from a Moore staffer.
Liberal bloggers contend their conservative counterparts have a leg up in getting broader attention for their stories because talk radio hosts like Sykes and, to a lesser extent,
Mark Belling promote their ideological soul mates on the airwaves. Confirmation of a sort comes from Bice, who says radio talkers generate 50 times more e-mails when they go after him compared with what blogger critics generate.
The reality is that bloggers have become a permanent fixture in the media marketplace but remain largely on the margins. “The relationship with the mainstream media is very symbiotic,” says Robinson. “Bloggers can”t exist without the mainstream media, and mostly don’t want to.”
