bobbyw24
10-30-2009, 04:27 AM
Washington Times Reaches Out to Tea Partiers
TheConservatives.com Designed to Grab Story Ideas From Activists, Conservative Groups
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, way back in March, people who stopped by The Washington Times’ spacious booth could pick up red glossy business card-sized advertisements that just said: TheConservatives.com.
As the year went on, TheConservatives.com remained a mystery. In June, John Solomon, the editor of The Times, did not directly answer a question from TWI about a new Times-run conservative site. “When I came to the Times a year ago,” Solomon told TWI at the time, “I relinquished control of the editorial pages, which report directly to the publisher and a separate opinion editor. Our opinion pages, of course, have a center-right voice. But the decision I made created an important firewall between a newspaper’s opinion and news machines and one I encourage other editors to follow.”
Behind the scenes, the Website was slowly staffing up and getting ready for an official launch. This week, TheConservatives.com got an official rollout. Solomon appeared at a Heritage Foundation luncheon to introduce conservative bloggers to this new site. Sitting on his right was Brian Faughnan, a writer for RedState.com and The Weekly Standard who does most of the management of TheConservatives.com from The Times’ newsroom. Sitting on his left was Rob Bluey, the director of online strategy for the Heritage Foundation, an adviser to the site.
“We have a lot of excitement about this project,” said Solomon. “We think it does for the conservative side what Obama tried to create with his Blackberry tether, with all those people that he activated.”
Solomon sold the new site as a way to bring the energy and distributed reporting of conservative activists into the Washington mainstream. “We’re not trying to supplant or replace RedState or Townhall,” he said. “We love those sites–they play valuable, valuable roles every day. We want to create a new medium where things from Townhall and RedState and Twitter and Facebook are all aggregating up, and the most interesting ideas from grassroots, from the meritocracy of ideas, bubble up, using technology. And then we use our relationship with The Washington Times to marry the grassroots to the leadership every day.”
The launch of this new site, coming from a newspaper with extensive access to Congress and the White House, is only the latest example of a traditionally conservative news organization putting a premium on web outreach to conservative activists. Seven months ago Fox News debuted FoxNation.com, an opinion site that’s become a home for sensationalist articles and roiling, Democrat-bashing comment sections. The network even promoted the Website by asking Republicans like Mitt Romney and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) to endorse it. TheConservatives.com is relatively late to the party. But Solomon’s vision puts the site in a key role for conservative media, as an aggregator and amplifier for stories that might come from conservative organizations or from the activist base. In one way, it is crowding out long-standing conservative groups like Accuracy in Media — a forty-year old press-watching group that dogs mainstream reporters and networks. But in another way, it is doing what many liberals attack Fox News for doing–making sure that stories don’t die at AIM or on Facebook, instead making it into the mainstream.
In his pitch at the Heritage Foundation, Solomon made all of this explicit. The Times, he explained, played an important role in pushing stories that the White House didn’t like. “Before Andrew Breitbart did the ACORN series,” he said, “we did 47 stories
http://washingtonindependent.com/65722/theconservatives-com-wash-times-reaches-out-to-tea-partiers
TheConservatives.com Designed to Grab Story Ideas From Activists, Conservative Groups
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, way back in March, people who stopped by The Washington Times’ spacious booth could pick up red glossy business card-sized advertisements that just said: TheConservatives.com.
As the year went on, TheConservatives.com remained a mystery. In June, John Solomon, the editor of The Times, did not directly answer a question from TWI about a new Times-run conservative site. “When I came to the Times a year ago,” Solomon told TWI at the time, “I relinquished control of the editorial pages, which report directly to the publisher and a separate opinion editor. Our opinion pages, of course, have a center-right voice. But the decision I made created an important firewall between a newspaper’s opinion and news machines and one I encourage other editors to follow.”
Behind the scenes, the Website was slowly staffing up and getting ready for an official launch. This week, TheConservatives.com got an official rollout. Solomon appeared at a Heritage Foundation luncheon to introduce conservative bloggers to this new site. Sitting on his right was Brian Faughnan, a writer for RedState.com and The Weekly Standard who does most of the management of TheConservatives.com from The Times’ newsroom. Sitting on his left was Rob Bluey, the director of online strategy for the Heritage Foundation, an adviser to the site.
“We have a lot of excitement about this project,” said Solomon. “We think it does for the conservative side what Obama tried to create with his Blackberry tether, with all those people that he activated.”
Solomon sold the new site as a way to bring the energy and distributed reporting of conservative activists into the Washington mainstream. “We’re not trying to supplant or replace RedState or Townhall,” he said. “We love those sites–they play valuable, valuable roles every day. We want to create a new medium where things from Townhall and RedState and Twitter and Facebook are all aggregating up, and the most interesting ideas from grassroots, from the meritocracy of ideas, bubble up, using technology. And then we use our relationship with The Washington Times to marry the grassroots to the leadership every day.”
The launch of this new site, coming from a newspaper with extensive access to Congress and the White House, is only the latest example of a traditionally conservative news organization putting a premium on web outreach to conservative activists. Seven months ago Fox News debuted FoxNation.com, an opinion site that’s become a home for sensationalist articles and roiling, Democrat-bashing comment sections. The network even promoted the Website by asking Republicans like Mitt Romney and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) to endorse it. TheConservatives.com is relatively late to the party. But Solomon’s vision puts the site in a key role for conservative media, as an aggregator and amplifier for stories that might come from conservative organizations or from the activist base. In one way, it is crowding out long-standing conservative groups like Accuracy in Media — a forty-year old press-watching group that dogs mainstream reporters and networks. But in another way, it is doing what many liberals attack Fox News for doing–making sure that stories don’t die at AIM or on Facebook, instead making it into the mainstream.
In his pitch at the Heritage Foundation, Solomon made all of this explicit. The Times, he explained, played an important role in pushing stories that the White House didn’t like. “Before Andrew Breitbart did the ACORN series,” he said, “we did 47 stories
http://washingtonindependent.com/65722/theconservatives-com-wash-times-reaches-out-to-tea-partiers