http://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis/2007/02/part_2_the_politico_multimedia_and_niche.php

Friday, February 16, 2007

Part 2: The Politico: multimedia and niche, a model for future newspapers?

. . . It just happens that Politico might have a winning business model, despite the number of other Capitol Hill publications . . .

- - editorsweblog.org

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/mediapolitics/3148.html

Politico Hopes To Rock Washington Media
By Harry Jaffe

22 Jan 2007

. . . To understand the business model, I visited Politico’s publishing side and sought out Marty Tolchin, the oldest hand of all. Tolchin, 78, started with the New York Times in 1954 and left to start The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, in 1994. After Tolchin eased away from The Hill, Allbritton hired him to help launch Politico.

Is there advertising money left on the table, even after companies like Boeing have been in Roll Call, The Hill, National Journal, and the Washington Post?

“No question,” Tolchin says. “This is a very cost-effective way to send a message to Congress. A full page ad for us can cost $10,000. It would cost ten times that in the Post or New York Times.”

Besides, adds Tolchin, the new ethics laws limit the way lobbyists can cater to public officials, such as paying for trips and tickets to athletic events.

“What are they going to do with all that money?” he asks.

Tolchin, with his wife Susan, recently published A World Ignited, his seventh book. He understands that money will drive Politico: “It definitely will succeed, simply because these people will spare no expense.”

- - "Washingtonian" magazine

Web ads may not bring in much money, but the Politico's business model isn't based on web ads. It's based on the thrice weekly (Albritton is restricted from publishing daily) hardcopy edition, and on filling that edition with the kind of stories that people on K Street and on Capitol Hill like to see.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?ei=5090&en=e32072d786623ac1&ex=1292389200&pagewanted=print

The New York Times / Front Page
December 16, 2005
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

. . . The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said. In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain . . .

And what was it about the "expanding chain" that made Goldsmith judge it as terribly wrong, a judgement in which dedicated pro-Bush hardliners concurred?

Dover Bitch :

. . . Ben Wittes wrote (via Marty Lederman):

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070514&s=wittes051707
. . . In the long run, in other words, the bad guys won. The ranks of people willing to say no to the White House thinned . . .
- - Benjamin Wittes @ TNR online

- - Dover Bitch - - Thursday, May 17, 2007 05:17 PM

Doesn't the term, "bad guys" imply, you know, some kind of actual opinion about actual, you know, wrongdoing?

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-super-smart-insider-experts-opine.html

Monday, February 05, 2007
How the super-smart, insider experts opine
The New Republic has published an article by Benjamin Wittes, a "Guest Scholar" at the Brookings Institution, which argues that the issues surrounding the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping activities are so complex and sophisticated, and raise such grave matters of national security, that not even the most brilliant and well-informed insider-experts -- such as Wittes -- could possibly form an opinion about whether the Bush administration did anything wrong. Only blind, ignorant partisans would claim that President Bush acted wrongfully or illegally here . . .
- - Glenn Greenwald

Also note that Fred Hiatt is Ben Wittes's boss.

http://www.washpost.com/news_ed/editorial/editboard.shtml

The Washington Post

Editorial Board

Fred Hiatt, Editorial Page Editor

[ . . . ]

Benjamin Wittes, Editorial Writer

If Fred and Ben are coming around, then maybe Fred's conservative Republican boss, Don Graham, is also coming around.

Not that Don orders them what to write every day -- it's not like that, but they were hired because Don Graham likes the way they think, and thinks the way they think. Yet another sign that the Bush regime is unraveling.

Dover Bitch :

. . . it's hard to see how anybody, in light of Comey's yarn about the hospital, could see Gonzales and Bush as the "good guys" in this scenario.
- - Dover Bitch - - Thursday, May 17, 2007 07:13 PM

I agree. But a couple of blogging law profs don't.

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2007/05/in-which-im-cured-of-serious-case-of.html

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
In which I'm cured of a serious case of NPR-inspired unease.
Yesterday, I called the testimony of James Comey before the Senate Judiciary Committee "disturbing." Although I didn't link to it, I was influenced by this NPR report that I'd heard in my car. And I really must confess that I struggle on a daily basis with the powerful emotional tendrils that spiral out of NPR and twine around my brain cells! So let's seek out some counterbalance today. Here's John Hinderaker's defense of the Bush administration . . . I'm declaring myself cured of that NPR-inspired unease about all this.
- - posted by Ann Althouse at 4:34 PM

http://instapundit.com/archives2/005216.php

May 15, 2007
John Hinderaker has reviewed the Comey testimony and says there's less to this story than generally reported: "It's an interesting story. But, based on what we know, it is not clear that there is anything discreditable anywhere in it."
- - posted at 07:52 PM by Glenn Reynolds

According to Nattering Nabob, becoming an arsonist and getting involuntarily committed to a mental hospital proves that torture doesn't warp you.