The pocket furor over bloggers demanding more support from the institutions they promote speaks as strongly to the weirdness of the traditional media business model as to the hopes of the lefty blogosphere. For the last few weeks, I've been waking up to e-mails from Mike Allen's Playbook, the subject lines of which have been, "Playbook, presented by the Auto Alliance." Auto issues, of course, have figured prominently into recent Playbooks. But we're so used to that business model that we hardly even notice it. The difference, of course, is that there's more of an implied quid pro quo in Jane Hamsher's argument that organizations "expecting [lefty blogs] to give them free publicity" should be advertising, offering fellowships, or otherwise doing something "to help financially." Traditional outlets claim to wall off the advertising department from the content production, and for the most part, that's pretty successful, though there are certainly unavoidable pressures and conflicts. Lefty blogs are breaking down that wall. Traditional media types are appalled, though part of the ferocious reaction, I imagine, is that this sort of thing clarifies the ways in which funding journalism off of advertising can be a bit corrupting. Gawker, for instance, angrily terms the lefty blog strategy as "extortion," though they routinely have posts like "warm handshakes with the advertisers" and "a bow and a namaste with the advertisers" that are written by their staff writers. They may be independent of their advertisers, but they're not walled off from them. And so the whole business model develops a continuum of independence rather than a simple assumption of it. But my sense is that liberal blogs are not much interested in claiming independence from the liberal movement. They're interested in being recognized as a valuable wing of it. Hamsher's idea for "fellowships" actually seems like a perfectly appropriate way to understand the connection. The issue isn't that Americans United for Change want "free publicity." It's that they're not recognizing the operating costs that render that publicity possible. What Hamsher and others seem to be arguing is that if blogs are to be considered part of the leftwing infrastructure, that the moneyed elements of the coalition realize that full-time blogging isn't a costless endeavor and commit to funding blogs just as you'd fund field organizing. That's not, as Gawker would have it, extortion. It's movement-building. And they're part of the movement.
