The Way The World Works

Cathy Seipp explains how the Blogosphere works to the L.A. Times:

KINDER-HEARTED people than me have been fretting lately about the impending loss of 85 editorial jobs at the Los Angeles Times. But I’d up the number to include anyone who had anything to do with the unbelievably lame cover story on the L.A. blogosphere in the Dec. 1 Calendar Weekend, including the editors responsible for it.

If you missed that piece, allow me to summarize. An article called “Blogging L.A.” included neither the much-hyped L.A.-based commercial blogging enterprises that began this year (the Huffington Post and Pajamas Media, of which I’m a member), nor any of the major L.A. blogs (Kausfiles, the Volokh Conspiracy, Little Green Footballs, et al) except L.A. Observed and Defamer, and then only in passing.

Readers of this story would also have no idea that proto-blogger Matt Drudge began the Drudge Report here (his right-hand man, Andrew Breitbart, who still lives in L.A., recently began a news service called Breitbart.com) nor that the rise of influential (and profitable) big political blogs is, I’m sure, one reason traditional newspapers have been losing circulation and advertising