I forgot to mention it earlier, but I’m posting over at Crooks & Liars for a few days while John is attending a funeral. You’ve only missed two posts so far, but here they are anyways :

Open Sores Media

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the orgy of self-congratulation that is OSM™, let me quickly highlight this section from their press release yesterday :

Open Source Media currently features content from more than 70 bloggers worldwide, primarily focused on political and current events. However, the goal is to expand its scope to eventually include all forms of coverage, from local news to pop culture to sports, fashion, food, hobbies and more.

Along with this bit from the National Review’s puff piece earlier this week :

Bloggers don’t work nine-to-five; they post around-the-clock. They don’t file one story a day; they might update dozens of times throughout a 24-hour period. And they are everywhere. The New York Times has 53 bureaus worldwide (16 of them in the New York area). Pajamas Media plans to easily top that number, and at a fraction of the cost.

Wow. With $3.5 million in funding, more than 70 contributors, and a 24/7 posting schedule, I’m sure the guys in pajamas are blogging up a storm, right? Well, only if you consider five posts a storm. By comparison, The Huffington Post had 65 posts in its first day.

I guess it must be hard to pat yourself on the back and type at the same time.

What She Said

Since it’s already a few posts down, let me highlight and endorse what Avedon said below :

I actually meant to include this in my previous post, and judging from comments it’s just what some of you want – a media contact list. So let me encourage you to tell the media how outrageous you find it that they give so much coverage to ludicrous right-wing talking points and then don’t cover the response from the Democratic leadership – or from the majority of Americans.

Even better than FAIR’s media contact list is this section of the Democratic party’s site :

All you have to do is enter a zip code and it will bring up a form for you to contact multiple local and national media outlets at the same time. This is an especially useful resource if you wanted to, let’s say, contact the Arizona Daily Star and tell them that John McCain is a fraud whose “toughness” only comes out when it’s politically safe to do so or The Greenville News to tell the people of South Carolina that their Senator wants to destroy some of our most basic rights as Americans. With the public finally starting to wake up to the moral cowardice of the Republican majority, I can think of quite a few places that could use a friendly reminder that their representatives are part of the problem.

So take advantage of the Democratic media contact page, folks. It’s a damn good resource that people don’t use nearly as often as they should. Then again, it might be more popular if the site’s webmaster hadn’t (a) hidden the form under the site’s non-descriptive “Action” tab and (b) failed to include a redirect from the forms old URL (democrats.org/media) to its new one democrats.org/page/speakout/letterstoeditors). Just in case it gets shuffled around again, you might want to bookmark this one.

Yes, I’m still posting over at This Mordern World as well, though I haven’t posted there in a few days.