Read a Lot and Mix up Your Reading

You can’t comment on politics if you don’t know what’s going on. Start by building a list of news websites you’ll visit at least once a day. That list will depend upon where you live, of course, but we recommend that it include some of the largest and most visited sites around the world: BBC News, CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and perhaps China Daily for a start. It should include some less widely followed but well-respected sites such as Vox, Slate, Vice, the Christian Science Monitor, and Politico. You should also monitor online video sites watched by news junkies on the right and left. These range from the TV websites of foxnews.com (right) to democracynow.org (left), and the magazine websites of The National Review (right) to The Nation (left).

If you’re monitoring the news media themselves, follow specialized media criticism such as NPR’s On the Media, the Poynter Institute’s website poynter.org, and mediagazer.com.

Finally, you can also check in regularly with what are known as “news aggregators.” These sites don’t produce news stories, but instead gather the most popular articles from thousands of newspapers around the world and present the top stories on one page. The two best are Google News and Yahoo! News.

There are ways to organize these reading habits to make them easier. If you’re working on a desktop computer, for example, create a folder full of bookmarks for your go-to websites. When you sit down to read the day’s news, you can open all of them at once by using browser tabs. (In Chrome, go to the “Bookmarks” menu, scroll down to the folder, and choose “Open All Bookmarks” from the drop-down menu; do the same in Safari, except choose “Open in Tabs” from the dropdown menu.) Or, as we discussed in Chapter 3, “Getting Started,” you can use an RSS reader.

If you have a tablet or a smartphone, there are several useful free apps with simple customization features you can use to follow news websites, including Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, Feedly, and News360.

Choose a Place to Stand on the Political Spectrum

When Skip Murphy and a friend decided to start a blog in 2006, they already knew where they stood on the political spectrum: they were conservatives who supported the New Hampshire Republican platform. These core political beliefs still guide their blog posts.

The two named their blog GraniteGrok—New Hampshire’s nickname is “The Granite State,” and the slang word “grok” means to understand something so well that you are a part of it. “Our concentration is New Hampshire, a small state where one person can make a difference and retail politics still holds sway,” Murphy says. “I literally can walk down the street to yell at my state representative, and my state senator (a Democrat) is just a town over.”

Writing from their political “core foundation,” he says, “has earned us the trust and confidence of our target audience.” The readers who know where they stand on the New Hampshire political spectrum seek out GraniteGrok because they stand in the same place. Political bloggers attract an audience by staking out and maintaining a clear political perspective.

David Goldstein

“Write fearlessly”

David “Goldy” Goldstein of Seattle, Washington, is the founder and chief blogger at the Horse’s Ass political blog. Goldstein has worked as a staff writer at The Stranger, an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle, and hosted “The David Goldstein Show” on Seattle’s news/talk station 710-KIRO from 2006 through 2008.

David “Goldy” Goldstein

Why did you start your blog? When did you start it? How long did it take to build an audience?

I transformed Horse’s Ass into a blog in May of 2004. Readership took off in November 2004, during the recount and legal battles over Washington state’s incredibly close 2004 gubernatorial election. It gradually built over the next few years, peaking at about 5,000 visitors a day during the 2008 election.

How do you come up with ideas for blog post topics? What news sources, blogs, and other sources of information do you regularly read?

I mostly focus on Washington state and local politics, with an emphasis on media criticism, so my primary muse is our local media. Additionally, I tend to follow national news media and national blogs. That said, because I have proven to be such an effective muckraker over the years, some of my best stories come to me in the form of tips. Blogging at its best comes from seeing the real story in the same news that everybody else is reporting. It is a form of conceptual journalism.

How frequently do you post to your blog (in an average week) and how many hours each week do you spend working on your blog?

When I was blogging full time, I posted three to five times every week day, depending on the length of the pieces I was working on, at least once a day on weekends. And it was a full-time job. I probably spent 50 to 60 hours a week writing. Frequency is absolutely crucial to building and maintaining an audience. If you don’t have a fresh content, readers do not come back.

With so many political blogs out there, how have you made yours different and unique?

You need to build a personal relationship with your readers. This is a first-person medium— I read the news, pick out the important stories, focus on the best (or worst) reporting, blockquote out the significant sections, and then attempt to put it all in context. Readers come to me because they trust me to do all this work for them. Lacking a newspaper banner to automatically grant us credibility, successful bloggers must build and maintain that trust.

As for Horse’s Ass, part of our success is just damn good writing. I’m a writer first. I care about words. And that comes through. Also, I provide an aggressive style and attitude that readers quietly crave out here in passive-aggressive Seattle. I say the things a lot of respectable people wish they could say. And so that makes me fun to read whether you love me or hate me.

What advice would you offer young people who are just thinking about starting their own political blogs?

1. Above all, write for yourself. Write the kind of blog that you want to read. Chances are you’ll never find much of an audience; most blogs don’t. So if you write for yourself, at least you’ll be happy with the result. But if you try to write what you think people may want to read, chances are it will suck, and then you still won’t find an audience, but now even you won’t be happy with your work.
2. To heck with objectivity. Wear your bias on your sleeve and trust people to be smart enough to read you in that context. It’s more honest. And it is incredibly freeing. If you don’t have an opinion, you’ve got nothing to say, and if you do have an opinion but don’t share it, that is a lie of omission.
3. Never lie and always correct your errors.
4. Choose your enemies. The best way to build your readership and credibility is to get into a pissing match with somebody who has much more readership and/or credibility. And never go after the weak and the powerless—that includes the underage children of the powerful. Children are off limits.
5. Don’t bother blogging unless you are willing to devote the time and energy necessary to blog successfully.
6. Write fearlessly. I’ve always been enamored of Gustave Flaubert’s advice to a young writer: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

The best-informed political blog readers, of course, will seek out competing perspectives. Though most readers in today’s politically polarized world seek confirmation of their own views, here’s an example of what can be learned by looking a little further.

When the U.S. company Burger King bought the Canadian company Tim Hortons, Burger King executives announced plans to move the company’s headquarters to Canada, thus paying the lower Canadian corporate tax rate. The Federalist, a right-wing blog, and Daily Kos, a left-wing blog, offered two very different takes on the news.

Conservative blogger David Harsanyi at The Federalist wrote:

The next day, partly in response to Harsanyi, liberal blogger Jon Perr of Daily Kos made it no less clear where he stood:

Harsanyi and Perr’s references may be obscure to the casual reader— such is the world of political blogging. But their positions on the issue couldn’t be more clear. They’ve taken a stand.

Show Your Readers Where Your Facts Came From

In Michigan, one of the 10 most populous states in the United States, the website michiganliberal.com, serves as a blog “hub”—a place to which many bloggers contribute—to present “commentary and information from a vaguely leftish point of view.”

A post about the City of Detroit’s controversial plan to shut off the water to thousands of homeowners who had not paid their water bills talked about two mainstream media reactions to the news. The post attacked a Detroit News columnist and praised a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. (Just so you know before you read the example below: michiganliberal.com refers to Detroit News columnist Frank Beckmann as “Fried Chicken Frank” because of a column Beckmann once wrote, seen by many as offensive, that used the stereotype of African Americans’ supposed love of fried chicken.)

The underlined words in that paragraph link to the “Fried Chicken Frank” (Frank Beckmann) column the blogger finds not just awful, but “awfulest.” The blogger continues:

The underlined words in this paragraph link to the Kaffer column the blogger admires. (There is no link to Nolan Finley column.)

Just as reporters use attribution (“… according to Police Chief John Smith”) to tell readers the source of a piece of information, bloggers identify the source of information by linking to that source, so readers can examine it for themselves.

Linking to a source becomes even more important when you are blogging about facts rather than opinions. Murphy of GraniteGrok wrote an outraged blog post about a New Hampshire school committee that limited public comment at its meeting. He wrote a second blog post on the topic when he read that another town’s school committee had taken a similar action.

Murphy links in his first paragraph to a previous post on the GraniteGrok blog to help the reader understand the background. Then he links to the news story in a local paper that served as the basis for this second blog post.

Later in the second post, he links to a primary source: the website of the New Hampshire School Boards Association. When a political blogger links to a primary source, it allows readers to see for themselves what a document contains rather than just a report by a media outlet (which may or may not be reliable). It also demonstrates to the reader that the blogger has done independent reporting.

Political bloggers can find mountains of primary source material available on the Internet—texts of politicians’ speeches, pieces of legislation, court decisions, and almost unlimited data gathered by government agencies. This serves readers by allowing them to see firsthand the actions and decisions of political leaders and politicians whose actions are the fodder of bloggers. It also allows bloggers to contribute as reporters by giving context that the secondary sources to which they link, such as news stories, have not included.

Take, for example, a blogger writing a post about unemployment rate data released by the government. The blogger could link readers to a short news story or a blog post about the unemployment data. But it would be more useful to the reader to link to the full report of the data that the government will have posted on the Internet.

The lesson, then, is not only to link, but to link to primary sources whenever possible. Most bloggers don’t do that.

Build a Single, Strong Argument

If you are going to write a blog post blaming the government for the high unemployment rate, don’t wander off halfway through to talk about war in the Middle East or how someone stole the last election. Save those topics for other posts.

Here is the roadmap for building a powerful, focused political argument:

• Research your topic and take notes. Facts always build arguments, especially when you’re writing about politics. Open up a blank word processing document on your computer when you start your research and name it “Notes.” When you find a fact to support your argument, copy and paste it into your “Notes” document— copy the Web address, too, so you can link to the page in your post. You may also want to copy a few direct quotes from your sources. Make sure you put these in quotation marks and attribute them. Using the exact words of others without quotation marks is plagiarism. So is stealing their information without attribution.
• State the main point of your argument at the start of the post. Most inexperienced writers start a piece of writing with platitudes and generalities—throat-clearing, basically—before they get to what they really have to say. The reader isn’t interested in all that phlegm. Go straight to the point.

A post on the conservative blog PowerLine begins with a forceful perspective:

That last sentence makes it quite clear where the author stands. But another post on the same blog, headlined “Alex Mooney’s opponent makes desperate Holocaust reference,” begins with the writer rambling:

The reader has to plow through the writer’s talk about his friend and how he has written about him before, and who his friend’s opponent is, and what the polls are saying, and how Casey is “out-of-step,” until, in the eighth paragraph, the writer finally gets to the point: Casey calls his opponent’s characterization of his position on abortion “a lie,” and adds, “It’s like they said I was at Auschwitz. It isn’t true.” The writer of the blog, it turns out, finds this reference offensive. His offense is not noted until two-thirds of the way through the post.

• Use the facts you gathered to back up your point. Go through your notes and make a quick outline—nothing too elaborate—of the facts that you want to use in the order that you want to use them. This will help you think about how to build your argument most effectively.
• Anticipate the arguments against your position. All political positions have at least two sides. Often, they have more. Thinking about what other bloggers may write, or reading what they already have written, will allow you to make a stronger case for your own position.
• End with a suggestion of how to fix the problem. You don’t have to come up with a solution yourself. Odds are, a politician with whom you agree already has done so. By all means use it. Readers want to leave a blog post with not only a new understanding of the problem, but with some ideas about how it can be solved. Ending a post with a call for action helps readers engage. For example, a September 2014 post by the Economic Intelligence blogger Chad Stone on the website of usnews.com ended by recom mending actions the U.S. government should take to decrease the number of people living in poverty. “Policymakers should have expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for childless adults long ago,” he writes, referring to a tax break for low-income workers. “States that have not yet adopted the Medicaid expansions should take a hard look at the costs of their decision.”

Be a Voice, Not an Echo

Since the advent of political blogs more than a decade ago, the political blogosphere has been criticized by some scholars and commentators as relentlessly partisan. Conservative bloggers only read and link to other conservative bloggers, they say, and liberal bloggers do the same with liberals. Cass Sunstein, in his book Republic 2.0, called this “the echo chamber effect.”

With hundreds of thousands of political blogs out there, one way to be distinctive today is to serve as a marketplace of conflicting ideas, to take a clear, intelligent position while at the same time linking to and taking on the opinions of those with contrary views.

Closely Follow the Media Outlets in Your Niche

This should go without saying. If you’re going to present yourself to the world as a media critic, you need to keep up with the news and opinions being produced in your geographic or topical niche. When the editors of The Boston Globe asked Mark to write a media criticism blog for the Globe’s website, he already subscribed to four print newspapers (the two Boston dailies—the Globe and the Herald— along with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal). He also listened to all-news radio on AM in the morning and NPR on FM in the afternoon, watched at least two nightly newscasts (local and national), and checked in on various news websites and blogs over the course of the day.

If that sounds like a big time commitment, it is. It’s not that Mark did nothing but follow the news all day. He didn’t, because he had classes to teach and meetings to attend and deadlines to meet. Most of Mark’s news consumption came first thing in the morning, before going to the office, and in the evenings, when he had some time to catch up on the day’s events. But Mark always had opportunities throughout his work day to keep tabs on the news: listening to news stations on the car radio, checking the Web in free moments, and reading news and blogs on the mobile phone while eating lunch.

Mark’s news consumption habit solidified into routine during his 30 years in the news business, but anyone can pick up the habit. It takes a little work, but following the local news will not only keep you informed enough to write about media intelligently. It’s where you’ll get most of your ideas.

As you read and watch, think critically—and by critically, we don’t mean disapprovingly, we mean analytically. Study how the stories were put together: who was interviewed, what documents were cited, what gets emphasized in the story (and what doesn’t). Look, too, for gaps in coverage and errors in coverage. Think about what kinds of stories are overemphasized and which are barely covered or simply missed.

Reading the two Boston daily newspapers over breakfast one morning, Mark noticed the papers emphasized very different aspects of a story about the Provincetown, Massachusetts school committee voting to make condoms available to students in its elementary schools and high schools. He knew he had the makings of a blog post.

Rather than describe the two stories to his readers, Mark showed them, quoting the first two paragraphs of each story so the readers could see for themselves the difference in emphasis.

The Herald story began like this:

But the Globe story began like this:

Mark then told his readers that the 12-paragraph Herald story devoted six paragraphs to sources in favor of the policy, three paragraphs to sources against, and three paragraphs of neutral information. The Globe story had three sources who spoke in favor of the policy and three against.

To Mark, the Herald story was clearly biased. He noted while the Herald had only three paragraphs “devoted to a hostile opponent, those are the first three paragraphs of the story, and that makes the emphasis of the story clearly hostile to the Provincetown policy.”

Analytical thinking needn’t always lead to earnest writing. During his years as the media criticism blogger for the Boston Globe, Mark tried to have a little fun, for himself and his audience, whenever possible.

Boston winters are long, cold, and snowy, and Mark, as a lifelong Bostonian who always pays careful attention to the TV meteorologists’ forecasts, decided to take a look at who was the most accurate. For one predicted snowstorm, he set up a contest. Using his DVR to tape all five local newscasts, he recorded each meteorologist’s prediction 24 hours before the storm was due to hit. He didn’t tell his readers about the contest before the snowstorm, but, after the storm, he described setting up the contest in the present tense to give his writing more immediacy:

Once he had dug out from the storm, Mark checked the National Weather Service’s snowfall totals for Boston, switched to the past tense, and ranked the competition:

It wasn’t a tough post to research: as mentioned, watching TV news is part of Mark’s daily routine. The writing, too, practically took care of itself. What counted here was the idea. It had a natural audience. We all know everyone talks about the weather. This time around, contrary to a lament oft misattributed to Mark Twain, Mark Leccese did something about it.

Keep Up with Other Media News Bloggers and Critics, on the Web and Twitter

For all those media bloggers out there, only a handful report on the media daily. Following their posts can tell you what issues are drawing attention. It can also help you hone your own skills by dissecting how these sites cover the issues. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll see what angles they’ve missed. Here are some bloggers worth watching each day:

• jimromenesko.com. His was the first—and is still the best—of the media news and gossip blogs. In fact, when Romenesko started the blog in the 1990s, it was called “mediagossip.com.” It’s still something of the Bible of blogs for those who work in the news industry.
• Poynter MediaWire: www.poynter.org/category/latest-news/mediawire/. Poynter’s website also maintains a blog written by various authors on media news.
• mediagazer.com. This website publishes media news and media criticism from a wide variety of sources and is updated throughout the day.
• Columbia Journalism Review’s The Kicker: www.cjr.org/the_kicker/. A blog by various authors of media news, commentary, and media “must-reads,” compiled by the venerable Columbia Journalism Review magazine.

Be Tough but Fair

Call ‘em as you see ’em. No one wants to read a tentative, indecisive piece of analysis. A good piece of media criticism states an opinion and backs it up with facts and examples.

Journalism is a high-pressure business with inviolable deadlines; the goal of journalism isn’t to produce the best story possible, it is to produce the best story possible by deadline. Reporters, copyeditors, and the top editors at any news organization must make hundreds of quick decisions each day, and some of them may be wrong. Or at least open to question.

That’s where bloggers come in. A good media critic focuses on the story or stories journalists produce, not on the journalists themselves (with the exception of egregious ethical choices). Ad hominem attacks are always unfair. Sharp, reasoned criticism of the decisions made by reporters and editors in putting together a story, or choosing what to emphasize in a story, is not unfair.

Mark had an agreement with the Globe’s editor that he could write critically about the Globe on its own website as long as he didn’t take any “cheap shots.” (Mark also declined to be paid for his blog, because he believed accepting money from the Globe would create an inherent conflict of interest.)

When the Globe published a story about the Archdiocese of Boston reportedly blocking a local blog, critical of the archdiocese, from gaining access on its office computers, Mark found the story unfair and unbalanced—and said so:

The blog avoided “cheap shots” by using a fact-based analysis as the basis of a tough critique.

By being tough but fair, the media blogger establishes his or her credibility with journalists and readers alike. Strong opinions based on facts and factual analysis can provide a formula for success.

Don’t Expect to Make Friends

Journalists, like everyone else, don’t much like to read what others write about their work or their organizations. They can be thin-skinned. Media bloggers can’t afford to be anything but thick-skinned.

Mark wrote a blog post about the “sad, inevitable” decline of alternative weekly newspapers, including his city’s local alternative weekly, the Boston Phoenix. The post was quoted by a writer at salon.com in a post on the same topic, which in turn provoked the editor of the Phoenix, in his own blog, to express his displeasure:

Not only won’t media bloggers make friends, media bloggers—and political bloggers—will almost certainly at some point be personally attacked, called names, and have their intelligence called into question and their motives challenged.

This was not the only time Mark faced a sticky situation in writing about the news media.

In late 2012, Mark wrote a post about The Boston Globe’s handling of a case of plagiarism—an editorial writer had substantially plagiarized from an opinion piece at another Boston news website.

In the first half of the blog post, he used blockquotes to quote passages from the original opinion piece. He followed these quotes with passages from the offending editorial so that readers could see the similarities for themselves—and decide for themselves whether this was a case of plagiarism.

Boston is not a large city, and professional and personal connections among people who work in Boston media are frequent. Many people who worked in Boston media, and who knew the plagiarist personally, insisted this was not a case of plagiarism, but of carelessness.

Mark strongly disagreed. He considered it a clear-cut case of plagiarism and began to draft a blog post, a decision a couple of good friends encouraged him to rethink. It was an uncomfortable place to be.

But he wrote the post anyway. Why? It was an important story. And his “beat” was Boston news media.

Nor did he mince words:

The Globe, in an Editor’s Note, had said the editorial bore “some similarities in phrasing and structure” to an opinion column published by the website of the local NRP affiliate, wbur.org, and called that “inconsistent with Globe policies.” The writer who had plagiarized— who is also a columnist for the paper—was suspended for two weeks and then returned to writing a column.

As the controversy brewed, a panel of veteran journalists—including a good friend of Mark’s—appeared on the local TV talk show Greater Boston and argued the Globe writer did not plagiarize, but only used another writer’s work “as notes” and made “stupid careless mistakes.”

Mark’s blog spoke to the editorial, the paper’s reaction, and the defense mounted by the offender’s friends:

Writing about the news media’s actions—and failings—demands exceptionally high ethical standards. Many media critics, like Mark, first spend years working in the media. That’s not a prerequisite. But anyone who starts writing a media criticism blog because he or she wants to get even or wants to take on acquaintances and former coworkers shouldn’t be writing a media blog—unethical motives lead to unethical writing. On the other hand, media bloggers who are fair and honest and aren’t afraid to tick off people they know are widely respected and widely read.