Editor and Publisher has a Special Report up, “Do Political Bloggers at Newspaper Sites Now Drive 2008 Campaign Coverage?” by Joe Strupp. Since E & P is “America’s Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry,” as the masthead notes, the narrow focus is understandable. The article is mostly about the advantages of rag blogs vs. print stories, but it does provide some interesting observations, such as the political blogs rank near the top in hits of all the blogs at major newspapers, and the L.A. Times ‘Top of the Ticket’ blog gets 200K page views per month, which is not all that impressive compared to some of the non-newspaper political blogs.
The article, though interesting in terms of shedding light on the future of newspapers, has a “glass is half empty feel” about it, leaving many readers wanting to know more about the influence of non-newspaper political blogs. For the other half of the story, check out Terry McDermott’s “Blogs can top the presses,” posted, somewhat ironically on the L.A. Times website, to their credit.