Before I launched this blog, I checked to see exactly how Tom Scocca launched his. Answer: cleverly . Scocca punctured the pretense right away, bringing in Choire Sicha for a dialogue about why, in the year 2010, a blog was even necessary. The answer was unclear. And because the option of another funny dialogue is not open to me, let me try to grapple with that question.
The political news cycle moves fast, mercilessly fast. It used to be that you could settle on the sources you trusted for news and wait for them to report. That’s not really the case anymore. The first things you read — the first things I read — are the first few takes on stories. Five or six versions come out of the cannon, and the rest of the media catches up. That’s only how the news cycle works, of course. Some of the stories that matter are the ones that would not have been told if a reporter didn’t spend time uncovering it or a whistleblower didn’t spend time leaking it. But most of the stories are the ones that someone was simply the first to grab onto — a new political ad, a campaign finance oppo dump, something like that.
The goal of this blog is to sift, judiciously, through both kinds of stories and, as often as possible, to have the good ones first. It’s a news blog about politics and policy — especially conservative politics and policy — but it won’t have the buckshot approach of a Twitter feed or the post-a-day approach of a diary. The goal is to report and react to the political developments that matter—and, occasionally, to bury or debunk the news that doesn’t. That’s going to mean plenty of on-site reporting, interviews, polls, videos, and analysis of new arguments and new research. So thanks for reading, and here’s some background: the archive of my work for the Washington Post , my work for the Washington Independent , and my work for Reason magazine.
