Gloat not, Eric Boehlert

Checking for the latest news about Tucker Carlson's DailyCaller.com, I came across this recent gloatfest from Eric Boehlert of Media Matters:

[T]here is not one site in operation today on the right side of the Internet that consistently produces original and dependable journalism. And why is that? Because conservatives don't do journalism. They don't respect it and they don't have the foggiest idea of how to produce. They're clueless.

Now, as every regular reader knows, my reaction to Carlson's May announcement was not one of enthusiasm. Announcing at a Heritage Foundation luncheon that you're going to create the "Huffington Post of the Right"? Bad move. As I said, it had better not suck.

The seven months that have since elapsed -- first a projected July launch, then October, then November, now Jan. 11, with an announced capitalization of $3 million -- have not exactly inspired confidence. Neverthless, it occurred to me this evening that, my own profound doubts aside, failure of DailyCaller.com would give the Eric Boehlerts of the world an opportunity for more of their "conservatives don't do journalism" gloating.

So I've resolved to stop slagging Carlson and his project. He's obviously got enough problems without my perching on the bust of Pallas by his chamber door, croaking proclamations of impending doom.

UPDATE: Richard McEnroe of Three Beers Later commented below:

Not sure I agree with your decision to lay off Carlson.

Let me explain it by reference to Culture 11. I saw that as a debacle from the outset, but said so privately in an e-mail to a friend -- who had solicited me to write for the site -- and then mostly ignored them, until they started publishing idiot crap.

It would not be fair to continue slagging Daily Caller until we see whether it sucks or not. If Daily Caller turns out to be non-sucking, it will be a very helpful addition to the Right's online presence. And with $3 million in start-up capital, they're likely to be around more than the 6 months that Culture 11 lasted. As long as they are an ongoing effort of the Right, they are likely to have some beneficial impact.

I'm clearly on record about my doubts, so continued slagging would be redundant and vicious. And here's another analogy: John McCain. On the day Mitt Romney quit (Feb. 7, 2008), effectively ceding the GOP nomination to Crazy Cousin John, I resolved to vote Libertarian in November.

What was I to do, as a conservative political journalist, under those circumstances? Among other things, I covered the denouement of Hillary Clinton's campaign and the LP convention in Denver, and then turned my attention to the prospects for an Obama meltdown.

While much of mainstream journalism was swept up in the "historic Hope" theme, I noted with skepticism the Obama campaign's electoral calculus for winning without Ohio, and their belief that they might win Alaska (heh). And on July 14, I published this:

Evidence of conservative despair isn't hard to find nowadays in Washington.
"We're doomed!" one veteran communications operative of the Right exclaimed last week when I asked her to assess the current campaign.
Similar views are expressed privately by many other Republicans, including some professionally employed as part of the GOP election apparatus. Talking to them is like walking into the Redskins locker room before a Dallas game and being told by Washington players that the Cowboys are unbeatable. . . .
Perhaps overwhelmed by the media enthusiasm for Sen. Barack Obama . . . many conservatives seem to have accepted the Democrat's victory as inevitable, or even desirable. . . .

You can read the rest, but the point is that I can't stand to see a team just lay down and quit. Although there was never any possibility I could vote for my erratic cousin, nevertheless I wanted to see the GOP at least try to win the election. And the fact that there were people on the Republican Party payroll telling me they had zero hope of winning -- well, it infuriated me.

So I kept reporting about reasons to doubt Obama's inevitability until, finally, on Oct. 7, I published "How John McCain Lost," explaining that his endorsement of the Wall Street bailout had irreparably doomed the GOP ticket. (A verdict that has since been vindicated by every other account of the campaign.)

Looking back on the 2008 campaign, then, despite my vehement opposition to Maverick's nomination, I gave the Republican every benefit of the doubt until it was finally time to stick the fork in.

Same deal with Daily Caller. The possibility that it might succeed requires me to hope for its success -- or at least not to be a cheerleader for failure -- so long as there is a chance the venture can accomplish anything useful.

UPDATE II: Thanks to the commenter who tipped me to this background on Eric Boehlert's journalism career as a defender of jihadist professor Sami Al-Arian:

The American Left sprang to Al-Arian's defense. Their efforts included articles in The Nation and Salon.com, whose reporter Eric Boehlert lamented "The Prime Time Smearing of Sami Al-Arian." . . .
One FBI surveillance video of Al-Arian's fundraising tour of American mosques showed him being introduced as "the President of the Islamic Committee for Palestine . . . the active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement." . . . Al-Arian declaimed, "God cursed those who are the sons of Israel ... Those people, God made monkeys and pigs ... Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death."

In other words, Eric Boehlert defended a man as dangerous as Jeremiah Wright!

BlogoMathematics: Word Problem

On Nov. 14, The Other McCain notched its 3 millionth visitor. On Dec. 11, The Other McCain crossed the 3.2 million threshold. -- that is to say, 1/5th of the way to 4 million in 27 days. Therefore:

• At the current rate of traffic (roughly 7,000 per day or 200K per month), on what day will The Other McCain reach 4 million?
• How much faster would that goal be reached if Allahpundit would occasionally link me in the Hot Air Headlines?
• What would happen if Alyssa Milano re-Tweeted one of my posts?
• While we're at it, how much faster would the traffic grow if I could convince a rich guy to give me $3 million?

Show your work. This might be on the final exam. And if you're a rich guy, please hit the tip jar. Three million bucks would be OK, but so would $10 or $20.

Sad times for The Washington Times

Via Memeorandum, I notice my buddy Jimmie Bise has blogged about the recent sad news at the Washington Times. I left a comment there:

You know, Jimmie, I tendered my resignation in January 2008, two days after they hired the Washington Post's John Solomon to replace Wes Pruden as editor. Right after Solomon's hiring was announced, one of my newsroom colleagues said to me, "If I had wanted to work for a Postie, I would have applied at the %$#&ing Post!"

Exactly -- but that colleague didn't quit. I did. And my decision proved to be the smart move. I got out before things went to hell, which has given me a two-year head start on establishing an independent career online, while most of my former colleagues who haven't already been kicked to the curb soon will be.

Understand this: I never had anything personally or politically against John Solomon, and Dave Bossie (a staunch conservative) described Solomon as a good guy. But I've always felt that any good organization should promote from within, which had been the general policy of the Washington Times.

During my decade-plus at the Times (1997-2008), the top jobs were almost always held by people who had proven their ability and their loyalty through years of hard work for the company. The most notable exception to that policy was when they hired Tony Blankley as editorial page editor and, given Blankley's national reputation, there was not much grumbling about that.

The decision of the newspaper's management to pass over Fran Coombs in favor of Solomon as Wes Pruden's replacement was a mistake. Solomon's subsequent hiring of his Washington Post buddy Jeff Birnbaum as a managing editor was a worse mistake, and hiring USA Today's Barbara Slavin as assistant managing editor was worse still.

With three top newsroom positions filled by recent outside hires, the effective message to the newsroom staff was: "Screw you, you're not good enough to deserve a promotion."

The Disgruntled and Dysfunctional
Like I said, I'm glad I got out before that happened. In any large organization, just about everybody will eventually get passed over for promotion at some time, and it's easy to become disgruntled.

The promotion I got in 2003, from assistant national editor to editor of the "Culture, Etc." page, was not the job I wanted -- I actually begged them not to put me there -- but loyalty is loyalty. And I did such a good job at it as to make myself irreplaceable. (After I left, the new editors eliminated the culture page, which President Bush had praised as his favorite feature in his favorite paper.)

When I was hired at The Washington Times in November 1997, I'd promised my wife I'd only stay three to five years, then parlay that national-level experience into a job at some paper in her native Ohio. Ah, but then there was the Lewinsky scandal, the impeachment, the 2000 election deadlock, 9/11 . . .

How could I walk away from the thrill of being smack-dab in the middle of stuff like that? So I stayed, even if I was stuck in a desk-job that wasn't exactly my cup of tea. In doing so, however, I was violating career the advice I've always given to others: "If you don't move up, move out."

An Ounce of Loyalty
Life is too short to waste time being bitter because you didn't get the promotion you wanted. Either make the best of the job you're in, or else find another company that will recognize and reward your abilities. If you're really good at what you do, you'll success, and the company that failed to make full use of your abilities will regret your departure.

Beyond the general decline of the newspaper business, much of what has gone wrong at The Washington Times was a function of faulty organizational dynamics. The spirit of teamwork was undermined because of a relative handful of spiteful, selfish, disgruntled malcontents who did not heed Elbert Hubbard's wise advice:

If you work for a man, in heaven's name work for him!
If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him -- speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution he represents.
I think if I worked for a man I would work for him. I would not work for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time work against him. I would give an undivided service or none.
If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
If you must vilify, condemn and eternally disparage, why, resign your position and, when you are outside, damn to your heart's content. But, I pray you, so long as you are a part of an institution, do not condemn it. Not that you will injure the institution -- not that -- but when you disparage the concern of which you are a part, you disparage yourself.

There were too many people at the Washington Times -- only a handful, really, but enough to destroy the spirit of effective teamwork -- who thought they knew how to run a newspaper better than Wes Pruden and Fran Coombs knew how to run a newspaper. They have had their way and, as a result, the newspaper has been run into the ground.

It's a crying shame, and it remains to be seen whether The Washington Times can ever again become what it once was: The most important newspaper in the world, providing an invaluable balance to the liberal Post, reporting stories in the nation's capital that would have otherwise been ignored.

Tuckpo Update
Last night, I saw a friend who gave me the latest word on Tucker Carlson's long-delayed DailyCaller.com. They've reportedly gotten a new investment of $3 million and now expect to roll out in January -- at least six months later than Carlson promised in May.

Well, good luck with that, but I'm reminded of a conversation I had this past spring. After seeing what I'd written in the wake of the Culture 11 Hindenberg-at-Lakehurst implosion, I was contacted by guy who is affiliated with a major conservative foundation. He wanted to "pick my brain," as they say, about how an online news operation could be developed, and we talked for more than an hour.

Among other things, I explained that personnel is policy. What went wrong at Culture 11 had a lot to do with the fact that David Kuo was hired to run it. Kuo is a second-rater who couldn't make a profit on the snow-cone franchise in Hell, and there was nothing on his resume to suggest he knew anything about running a news operation. Hire the wrong guy at the top and you'll get bad results every time.

What I told my foundation-funded friend was this: If you're going to start a conservative news operation, the first thing you need to do is to hire Fran Coombs to run it. Nobody in Washington knows how to do it better, and anybody who tells you otherwise is wrong.

That was last spring. Given the subsequent success of BigGovernment.com, I'd say the second guy you need to hire if you're going to start a conservative news operation is Andrew Breitbart.

Whatever other decisions were subsequently made, any conservative news organization that could combine the Old School journalism savvy of Coombs with the New Media brilliance of Breitbart would be unbeatable. And you wouldn't need seven months and $3 million to make it happen.

As I say, I wish all the luck to DailyCaller.com. But it had better not suck.

Tucker Carlson continues slow-motion rollout of DailyCaller.com

Having missed its previously expected Nov. 9 debut, the site is still "coming soon" but at last Tucker has finally hired an actual reporter, my old buddy Jon Ward of The Washington Times:

I'm excited to announce that I have accepted a job as senior political and White House reporter for "The Daily Caller," the new political news website being launched by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. . . .
As I told Tucker the first time I met him, I'm invigorated by the opportunity to inhabit the new media space while reincarnating timeless journalistic values . . . I also think the Daily Caller's revenue-based compensation system for freelance work is going to be an innovative and precedent-setting part of being successful in a web-only venture. . . . (Emphasis added.)

Right. If Tucker ever actually gets the site online, his "revenue-based compensation system" will separate the haves from the have-nots. Whereas Tucker and the permanent staff (presumably including Ward) will receive actual salaries, the freelancers will be paid on a page-view basis.

When this plan was first described to me, I was like, "Whoa!" Having worked as both an editor who commissioned freelance work and as a freelancer, this sounds an awful lot like what we call "working on spec" -- first, you write the article, and then we'll decide if we're going to publish it and what we'll pay you, if anything.

That's OK, if you're a beginner looking to break into the game. But it's an insult to offer that kind of arrangement to an experienced professional, a known quantity in journalism who can be relied upon to deliver quality copy on deadline. The freelancer pitches an idea via phone or e-mail and the editor says "yea" or "nay." The fee is agreed in advance, and acceptance of the finished piece is more or less guaranteed, providing the writer can deliver what he promised. The freelancer gets that kind of commission agreement before he ever begins writing the article.

It's a simple fee-for-service arrangement and, while feelings can sometimes get hurt by a rejection, as least if when the freelancer gets the assignment, he knows up-front what the payment will be. This "revenue-based compensation system" that Carlson projects for the Daily Caller looks like a recipe for resentment from writers who feel they're being gypped: "Hey, why did you promote So-And-So's story at the top of the page, and not my story?"

When Jimmie Bise and I have occasionally discussed our own ideas for an online news operation -- and I agree with Jimmie that such a site could be launched on $500,000 first-year budget with no problem -- I've always insisted there should be a budget category for payments to freelancers. Fees might range from $20 to $200 per item, but if your average fee were $75 per item and you had a $75,000 freelancer budget, that's about 20 items a week right there. And in the world of online journalism, the freelancer who could reliably deliver three items a week would be earning more than some reasonably successful bloggers.

Anyway, if Tucker's partner Neil Patel is the same Neil Patel who wrote "Beginner’s Guide to Finding the Right Business Partner" -- irony alert! irony alert!

Of all the things that Tucker Carlson's ever done in his life, there is nothing in his biography to suggest he knows how to improvise a news operation on a shoestring budget. He may yet succeed wildly, but given that he announced in May that he'd be online in a matter of weeks -- and that the Daily Caller roll-out has now taken nearly six months, which is eons in the Blog Age -- the omens do not appear fortuitous.

To repeat: It had better not suck.

Michael Calderone asks a good question

And gets an interesting non-answer from the new management of my former employer:

Brett Decker, the managing editor of the [Washington Times] editorial and opinion pages, has been fulfilling [editorial page editor Richard] Miniter's duties the past few months, said staffers.
When reached for comment, Decker did not discuss Miniter, but commented more broadly about the opinion pages in a statement to POLITICO:
"The Washington Times has been putting a new Opinion team in place incrementally this year," Decker wrote. "We're plugging different people into different slots to see what works best. That process is still ongoing as we fine-tune our lineup."

Miniter was at the The American Spectator's Pig Roast three weeks ago, enjoying some fine Virginia whiskey and a Dominican cigar, but the one thing we did not discuss was his job at the Times. Richard reportedly had a heart attack shortly after he took that job, and I don't envy him. I've often remarked that if I ever told the story of my 10 years at the paper, the title of the book would be I've Served My Time in Hell.

The Washington Times is arguably one of the world's most important newspapers, and during Wes Pruden's tenure as editor-in-chief, there were times when there wasn't really much argument about it. The job of the Times, as Mr. Pruden conceived it, was to cover the stories that the liberal media tried to ignore -- and to cover those stories with such accuracy and relentlessness that the liberal media was forced to pay attention.

To work for Wes Pruden was not always an easy job, but it was a job to be proud of -- kind of like playing football for Bear Bryant. Even if you cussed the Old Man sometimes, when all was said and done, there was a genuine pride in being part of his team.

Since they changed editors in January 2008, the Times has gone through what 'Bama fans might call their "Ray Perkins Era" and, if you believe some of the gossip, it's sometimes gotten perilously close to the Bill Curry brick-through-the-window stage. But I never burn my sources, so I'll invoke my Miranda rights here.

Brett Decker's got a very impressive resume -- he once worked for Bob Novak, that "Unpatriotic Conservative" == so I reckon he knows his stuff. With no effort at all, I could name a dozen people who'd be qualified to run that editorial page (hello, Jed Babbin), and another three dozen who think they'd be qualified (hello, Tucker Carlson).

It's a coveted and prestigious job, and plenty of people would crawl half a mile through broken glass to get it (which may explain whatever problems Richard Miniter has experienced in the job). So we'll see what happens "incrementally."

Perhaps Decker will consult Mr. Pruden, who's still a regular columnist with the title of editor emeritus. Maybe the managing editor of Human Events could offer some useful personnel advice. Or ask Scott Rasmussen who he'd recommend for the job. Just sayin' . . .

(Via Memeorandum.)

Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller: MIA?

On May 26, Tucker Carlson of Fox News was front and center at the Heritage Foundation's weekly blogger luncheon, and began his presentation this way:

"I'm grateful to be here and I know a lot of you are already signed up to contribute, and I appreciate that. I know some of you have already come over and played poker or sampled our open bar, and I appreciate that, too. More where that came from.
"I'm editing a site called the DailyCaller.com, which ought to be up in about three weeks . . ."

"In about three weeks." Nearly six months have gone by and, whatever the status of the poker games and open bar, as of 7 a.m. ET, DailyCaller.com was still "coming soon."

While the site the Carlson was hired to edit has gone through the longest three weeks of development in the history of the Internet, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government last month had one of the most smashing debuts in the history of Internet news. More from Carlson's May 26 spiel:

"We are a general interest, which is to say, large, newspaper-type format site. Roughly along the lines of the Huffington Post . . ."

Breitbart himself designed the Huffington Post. Breitbart and Carlson are friends. I have no idea of what, if any, involvement Breitbart has had with the DailyCaller.com, but surely I'm not the only news professional puzzled that it would take six months to design and launch an Internet news site -- especially one which was announced with such fanfare.

Given that Carlson said six months ago that many of the attendees at the Heritage blogger luncheon were already signed up as contributors, they've got to be wondering just what it is they've signed up for. What has the DailyCaller.com got so far? Well, there's a Facebook page with some 600 "fans" and this description:

The Daily Caller will be a comprehensive news site, providing original reporting, constantly updated links to the latest news, analysis of current events, satire, research on current policy issues, columns from thought leaders, and Congressional Member reviews.

What does something like that cost? And why is it taking so long to develop? Who knows?

A couple of weeks ago, right before I left for Kentucky to cover the investigation into the death of Census worker Bill Sparkman -- a trip funded by tip-jar contributions from readers -- I found myself on the phone with blog-buddy Jimmie Bise. In the course of a 20-minute conversation, Jimmie laid out a simple scenario for building an online news operation on a shoestring budget. Jimmie summarized a lot of that conversation in a blog post a month ago:

Charlie Crist, who will be a continual thorn in conservatives’ sides if he’s elected to the Senate, raised $4.3 million in just one quarter this year. That much money could fund a good conservative news site for at least five years, if not more like eight. Do you know how much good reporting we could get with a budget of just $500,000 a year?

As Jimmie explained, there are plenty of good reporters who'd work for $70,000 a year. Four full-timers could be had for $250,000 or so, ranging the salaries from $40K for the junior staffer/trainee/clerk and then up: $60K, $70K, $80K for the top editor. Throw in another $100,000 for insurance, benefits, legal fees, etc., and you've still got $150,000 for promotion, advertising, travel, payments to freelancers, etc.

Development, design, launch? Jimmie's got WordPress know-how, I've got design, layout and editing experience. In terms of promotional hype, do you have any idea how much $10,000 will buy from BlogAd.coms? A freaking buttload, my friend.

Well, for all we know, DailyCaller.com will go live at 9 a.m., become a massive overnight sensation, and soon leave Matt Drudge, the HuffPo and the Associated Press trailing in their wake, as Carlson & Co. revolutionize news as we know it.

Or maybe not. Maybe the poker games, the open bar and the Facebook page are all we'll ever see. Maybe the DailyCaller's investors have already taken a look at the Beta format prototype and yanked their money out.

Who knows? But if and when the long-promised "large, newspaper-type format site" finally appears, I'll remind Carlson of the advice I offered the day after his big Heritage spiel: It had better not suck.

Oh, and NTCNews has an A.M. Market Update this morning. Seems the real-estate market's looking kind of squirrelly. Homelessness, Wall Street shenanigans, clueless regulators -- welcome to Great Depression II, according to one analyst.

But what do I know? Nobody ever gave me the start-up capital to throw poker parties with an open bar . . .

NTC: Bloggregating the News

Got up this morning and created the "TOP STORY: OBAMA AND JOBS" post at NTCNews.com, which took every bit of 10 minutes, augmented by subsequent additions.

The news business is not rocket science. That's the basic insight at NTCNews.com, an insight inspired in part by Protein Wisdom's slogan, "Because Not Just Anybody Can Summarize the News." And, thanks to Carol at No Sheeples Here, we're proud to report that you don't need a bowtie to aggregate the news, either.

The major inspiration, of course, was when Tucker Carlson came bigfooting into the blogosphere with his announcement that he would create the "Huffington Post of the Right." This raised lots of eyebrows. Tucker's a TV pundit. What the heck does he know about blogs?

Well, what does anybody need to know about blogs? (Other than The Rules.) For all we know, the "TuckPo" will be absolutely wonderful. But it had better not suck.

A Work In Progress
Meanwhile, rather than waiting around to see what The Bowtied One would bring forth, I collaborated with co-blogger Smitty and with Jimmie Bise Jr. of Sundries Shack to develop NTCNews.com.

It's a work in progress, but it is both working and progressing, while the TuckPo is still just a page bragging about "fearless journalism." (Hey, Tucker: Fear this, y'know what I'm saying?)

The thing is, several conservative activists had talked to me in recent months about the "Huffington Post of the Right" concept. My reply generally involved the question: What does HuffPo have that we don't have? Money, period. You give me the money Arianna Huffington's spent on that site, and I'd kick her ass from here to Brentwood.

Evidently, somebody gave Tucker Carlson some money -- one source told me Carlson had previously been turned down by various organizations he'd asked for funding -- and so now he's going to teach us bloggers how to aggregate the news.

How do bloggers feel about that? Among others, Michelle Malkin and Mitchell Blatt were profoundly skeptical. This goes back to CPAC in February, when Tucker Carlson proclaimed to the world that conservatives don't do reporting. As I said two weeks ago:

Having spent 10 years at The Washington Times, I know a thing or two about reporting news, and was insulted by this assertion by Carlson -- a rich-boy TV pundit -- that conservatives weren't doing reporting.
What about NewsMax? Human Events? The American Spectator? National Review? CNS? Townhall? All of these are conservative organizations that employ news reporters.
I remember seeing Byron York in a gym at a Sarah Palin rally in Pennsylvania, reporting from the scene. Tucker Carlson? Nope, he wasn't there.

Four days after the big TuckPo announcement, the Tiller murder story broke on a Sunday, and most bloggers were slow to pick up on it. Having already started developing "Not Tucker Carlson" on a Blogspot platform, the Kansas killing seemed like the kind of big story that could use some rapid aggregation. I called Jimmie and asked him to buy a domain name and, voila, NTCNews.com had its first top story.

Bowtie Optional
A work in progress, like I said. Wednesday night we got our first "scoop," being the first to report the remarks of George Will and Bill Kristol at the Bradley Prizes. Not a big story, but still a legit exclusive. And we've debuted a series of daily editorials, "300 Words Or Less," with guest contributions from bloggers including Fisherville Mike, TrogloPundit, Moe Lane and Becky Brindle. (Bloggers who want to offer a "300 Words Or Less" commentary should e-mail Smitty or e-mail Jimmie.)

We continue to work and progress. Over the past several days, while I was visiting Georgia, Smitty and Jimmie kept the site running without me. We plan to add more contributing aggregators -- other bloggers who can post news updates -- but if you'll scroll down through the NTCNews.com sidebars, you'll find a slew of blog feeds arranged so that the site is already "auto-updating" to a large extent.

What next? Who knows? Right now, we could use some money. Several people have already hit the tip jar. So far, it's a long way from Arianna Huffington's divorced-my-gay-millionaire-husband money, but we're grateful for every $5, $10 or $20 contribution. (Please specify the purpose of your PayPal donation, so it doesn't accidentally get mixed in with the Emergency Fireworks Fund.)

Can a handful of bloggers relying on tip-jar contributions create a major news site? If it's never been tried before, it's certainly about time.

PREVIOUSLY:
6/2: Bowtie Optional
5/29: 'This will not end well for him'
5/27: Exactly What Will the TuckPo Be?
5/26: Tucker Freaking Carlson?

'This will not end well for him'

So says TechCrunch's Leena Rao of Tucker Carlson and his DailyCaller.com project, which proposes to be the "Huffington Post of the Right," and which is already being laughed to scorn.

That's what was so ridiculous about him announcing it at a bloggers lunch, as I explained yesterday:

If you’re going to start a new Web site, you don’t begin by holding a press conference or issue a press release declaring your intention to start a new Web site. You bring the page up in beta, work the bugs out before anybody’s seen it, circulate the word to your blogger friends via e-mail, and only when you’ve got it rolling good and steady do you issue a press release and start doing promotion. All of which anybody in the business would have told you, if you had bothered to ask.

But of course, he didn't bother to ask, because he knows everything. After all, he's already worked at every cable-news outlet there is. If he flops at Fox (as he's flopped everywhere else) what next? Will he show up on Home Shopping Network? Yet if first-class free publicity is what he's looking for, he sure got it from the Wall Street Journal:

The site will take on the form of a general interest newspaper, he said, and will even attempt to be faster than the popular and speedy Drudge Report. . . .
Mr. Carlson writes for the Daily Beast and was recently named to the Fox News position after a stint as a political correspondent on MSNBC. . . . How will Mr. Carlson balance the responsibilities of running a news Web site with his duties at other outlets?

That's just it, you see: Tucker Carlson has never run a Web site. To my knowledge, he's never even run a group blog. And Michelle Malkin (averaging 7 million hits per month) tells Michael Blatt:

It’s not as easy as some people think it looks. . . . You have to approach the whole enterprise with a healthy does of intellectual humility. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to make something like this work. You're doing it 24/7. It takes more than money. I think that is the lesson of the failure of Culture 11.

Oh, cursed dirigible! Oh, the humanity! Tucker Carlson is going to come strutting into Malkin's 'hood talking smack? He's going to aggregate faster than Drudge? He's going to do original reporting online and hasn't talked to any of the young reporters I know in D.C.? (Ask Dan Riehl: I know everybody.)

Over at Newsbusters, Blatt quotes Carlson's response to Malkin: "I hope Michelle will take a close look at the site when it's out. I think she'll like it."

Then why the big announcement at Heritage? He couldn't have called Malkin who, between her own site and Hot Air, grabs 22 million visits a month?

Hey, what about The New Ledger? What are those guys, chopped liver? Red State? What about Jennifer Rubin at Commentary? And never even mind the usual suspects: National Review, Human Events, The American Spectator, The Washington Times, CNSNews, NewsMax, WorldNetDaily, Townhall, The Weekly Standard . . . hey, they've got a few reporters, too, y'know.

When you start out with a big announcement, effectively giving the back of the hand to so many of your fellow conservatives . . . well, it had better not suck.

"Conservatives need to . . . find out what’s going on."
-- Tucker Carlson, Feb. 27, 2009

UPDATE: At least one of the commenters has accused me of arguing ad hominem.

Guilty! And the commenter is guilty of the arrogant presumption that if I make an ad hominem attack, it is because I am incapable of making a point-by-point rebutal. But conservation of resources is one of the basic principles of warfare, and there are some arguments so ludicrous as not to merit the labor of constructing a detailed rebuttal.

My time is valuable, and if I make a point-by-point argument, the antagonist is thereby invited to reply with his own point-by-point argument. We might continue thus ad infinitum in a sort of intellectual trench warfare, overwhelming the spectators with a tedious re-hashing of minutiae. All fine and good for academic journals but for the blogosphere, not so much.

Tucker Carlson is an arrogant preppy who, according to Wikipedia, attended St. George's School (tuition $41K/yr.) and Trinity College (tuition, room and board $51K/yr. ). Let him rebut that argument!

Now, it happens that Friday evening I spoke by phone with a well-known Internet entrepeneur, a fellow who describes himself as enthusiastically "pro-Tucker." Having heard the explanation of my resentment over Tucker's presumptious bigfooting into the blogosphere, my friend said, "Well, why don't you reach out to him?"

"Dude, I did reach out to him. I kicked that bowtied son of a bitch right square in the knee."

Why is it that the Tucker Carlsons of the world expect the rest of us to kowtow to them, to admire and support them in such a way that it is our obligation to "reach out" to them -- cap in hand, tugging the forelock in reverent obeisance -- and never their obligation to reach out to us? Merely because my parents couldn't afford to send me to St. George's doesn't make me as a doormat upone which Tucker Carlson is invited to wipe his feet.

If you allow yourself to be a doormat, you can't complain about the footprints on your back, and just because Tucker Carlson doesn't know what I'm doing, he shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that I don't know what I'm doing.

Tucker Freaking Carlson?

Odd item of the day:

Pundit Tucker Carlson publicly announced Tuesday that a right-leaning news site resembling the Huffington Post he's been planning will go live within weeks.
Carlson will launch TheDailyCaller.com, which he said would focus on reporting on the Obama administration and "adding facts to the conversation."
"We are a general-interest newspaper-format style site," Carlson told conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday. "There just aren't enough people covering this administration and telling the people what's going on."

(Hat tip: Hot Air Headlines.) How long until the Culture 11-style Hindenburg-at-Lakehurst explosion of The Daily TuckerTuckPo? Anybody want to take a stab at an over/under? Please hand me a clue here, because I certainly know nothing about the news business or online publishing.

UPDATE: Despite my ignorance of news and online publishing, I just found what's called a "Web page" named "Google," which you can use to look up stuff. And I was surprised to find that, just two weeks ago, it was announced that Tucker Carlson had been hired by something called "Fox News" (it connects to your television set with what's called a "cable").

So maybe this online thing is just a hobby for him, at least until he gets fired from Fox like he did from CNN and MSNBC.

UPDATE II: Advice to Tucker Carlson: It had better not suck. See, the thing is, even though I'm not one of The Republicans Who Really Matter -- not the kind of "influential" guy who can get you hooked up with a TV gig -- you would never want to make me your enemy. Just ask Ross Douthat.

Or John McCain. Let you in on a little secret: Part of the rationale of this blog, originally, was the hope that somebody in the Republican Party might notice and be smart enough to think, "Hey, that loose cannon could be dangerous," and then inquire about the price to get it off deck. I'm notoriously lazy, and getting paid not to blog would be a sweet gig.

But I overestimated their intelligence. (You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of GOP political operatives.) Nobody ever got in touch with me, and by the time the campaign really got rolling, I'd completely forgotten about my original get-rich-quick scheme, and pretty soon I was racking up some impressive traffic and . . .

Well, now Technorati tells me the site's worth more than $200,000. Man, to think what I'd have done for even $50,000 as late as mid-2008. Chumps.