The New Bosses Congregate at YearlyKos

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I’m sitting in a YearlyKos panel called “Evolution and Integration of the Blogosphere.” The panelists are the blogosphere’s heavy hitters: Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers, now of OpenLeft, formerly of MyDD; Duncan Black of Atrios; Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and the John Edwards controversy; Ali Savino, co-founder and Program Director of the Center for Independent Media; and Amanda Terkel of Think Progress. Basically, all the folks we quasi-attacked in Dan Schulman’s piece entitled “Meet the New Bosses.”

Bowers, moderating the panel, begins by describing the entrenched nature of the top of the blogosphere: the most-viewed 50 progressive blogs have remained constant the last two years and hot new bloggers are just becoming diarists or contributors to these blogs. And, lest we here at MoJoBlog forget it, those 50 blogs get 95 percent of the blogosphere’s traffic.

Some panelists reject the idea of a blogosphere establishment, even in the face of Bowers’ facts, but Stoller makes the only legitimate point: the growth of the blogosphere may have occurred a few years back because the Bush Administration was so nasty and the mainstream press was so unwilling to expose the truth. There was a space for blogs. But now the press is critical of the administration and there is slightly less need for blogs. I’ll consider that. Savino, perhaps more willing to accept Bowers’ point than the rest, points out new bloggers’ best hope: local blogs and niche blogs.

In my mind, the facts are irrefutable: the blogosphere isn’t really the wild frontier with thousands of disparate voices that some people think it is. It has its own hierarchy, and even those who advocate opening up the voices in American democracy are content to perpetuate that hierarchy if they are at the top of it.

Man, I am never going to get on Townhouse.

Had a long section about diversity of the blogosphere that got deleted by our blog software. Basically, Bowers made a point that we made in our Politics 2.0 package — the blogosphere skews white, male, high-income, and well-educated. What can we do to bring in new voices?

Various responses from the panel. Savino points out that there is serious diversity on the blogs, just outside of the realm of politics. Arts bloggers, culture bloggers, gossip bloggers, and bloggers on urban and race issues are less monolithic demographically, and all can be tied to politics if the left-leaning political blogosphere reaches out to them. Stoller makes a point that many people are making here at YearlyKos: broadband penetration has seriously slowed in this country, and fewer and fewer people of color and people in rural communities are getting high-speed internet. If we can remedy that problem, we might address the blogosphere’s diversity issues.

Other topics that come up: reaching Spanish speakers, who are increasingly important politically; how campaigns treat bloggers vs. press; other stuff. When’s lunch?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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