The right will rise again with blogs?

Andrew Ratner writing at the Baltimore Sun predicts that conservative blogs will grow as they go on offense against Obama.

Will President-elect Barack Obama do for right-wing bloggers what President Bill Clinton did for political talk radio?

The last time a Democrat was in the White House, the Internet was just a glimmer of its present self. (The network famously locked up when users tried all at once to download the special prosecutor's report against Clinton in 1998.)

Blogs came of age with President Bush, whose mistakes provided ample nourishment for liberal bloggers to grow into some of the most authoritative names in the blogosphere. HuffingtonPost.com, the left-leaning news Web site and blog co-founded by Arianna Huffington, gets linked to more than any other blog, according to the blog tracker Technorati. Two other liberal blogs, DailyKos.com and ThinkProgress.com, follow at eighth and 23rd, respectively.

Conservative political blogs, which have had to play mostly defense in recent years, are lower on the totem. The most popular include two by Baltimore blogger Michelle Malkin (MichelleMalkin.com, No. 35) and hotair.com (No. 57). Also on the list, Newsbusters.org (No. 59), which jabs at liberal bias in the news media, and PowerLine.com (No. 98), which played a role in the Bush-National Guard documents scandal in 2004 that drove Dan Rather from CBS.

...

Simon Owens, 24, an analyst for New Media Strategies, an online consulting firm in Arlington, Va., said the blogs on the right, while heavy on opinion, haven't been as aggressive in investigative reporting as left-leaning blogs such as Huffington or TalkingPointsMemo.com. Firedoglake.com and other liberal blogs gained recognition last year for their exhaustive, live coverage of the Lewis "Scooter" Libby trial. (The blogs on the left were so dogged they even caused problems for their own on occasion, such as Obama's campaign trail quote about the working-class clinging to "guns and religion," which Huffington first revealed.)

"You'll see a lot more traffic on conservative blogs now that they're playing offense," said Owens, who also writes for PBS' Media Shift and on his own Bloggasm.com. "This may be the turning point for conservative blogs but they're lacking the investigative side or that community-organizing side. They're much more insular in their self-linking. The liberals are better at using other things online to help promote their causes. It's just a matter of older people coming online, with Facebook opening up beyond college students, etc."

...

"There's a natural fit between blogging and opposition," said Jay Rosen, a professor at New York University and author of pressthink.org, a media blog. But he feels the conservative blogs face the same crossroad of reassessment as the GOP itself.

"To me, the more interesting question is whether conservative blogs will be a location where the conservative movement and the Republican Party are rethought and reassessed," he said. "I'm not optimistic about that. The blogosphere reflects the divides within the coalition itself."

...
While PrairiePundit is a conservative blog, I don't consider it insular. I like to look at the mainstream media and see if they are saying anything that interest me. Often they will say things that I feel the need to criticize. Usually it is the observed conduct that is criticized, but occasionally the reporting or editing is also looked at.

I do think that conservatives were getting more interested in blogs before this election and being out of power will make them more interested in finding news and ideas that may return them to power and they are more likely going to find that here.

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