Blogs Bloggers Read

Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood

The best introduction to Nikki Finke may be this blistering email that she wrote to a GQ editor, who made the mistake of sending her a cookie-cutter PR pitch about a “a fairly intense, anonymous as-told-to by a Hollywood agent that’s all about how he poaches other agency’s clients:” (see Gawker for the full e-mail exchange between the two):

[…]You think having an unnamed Hollywood agent talking about poaching unnamed clients is a “get”? I have 300 interviews with real live Hollywood agents ON THE RECORD talking all about stealing clients and naming names, dates, places, etc. not to mention a whole bunch of even juicier stuff. But do you people ever think to actually call me to do an article for you? Noooooooooooooooooooooo….

Because I’m not 24 years old…

Because I’m not making up stuff.

Because I don’t live in New York.

Because I don’t kiss up to the idiots who decide which stars magazines like GQ can and can’t put on their covers.

Because I actually know something about Hollywood.

Here’s a thought: Why not ask me to put together the juiciest Hollywood stories I know for your magazine. Oh, you’re running late for lunch at Michael’s?

How come I’m not surprised.

Harsh? Needlessly alienating? Directed at the wrong person? Maybe so, but there’s meat behind her critique. Not to single out GQ, but the number of publications focusing on real, painstaking journalism, with multiple sources and all, has been in an alarming dwindle even before dastardly Web-Logs ruined everything. Enter Nikki Finke: a one-woman trade publication whose tenacity has landed her scoop after scoop even as, House-like, it’s made her a lot of enemies. The media biz isn’t exactly at a want for big egos, but if more reporters had Finke’s willingness to speak truth to power — and really work the phones — the industry would be in a much better place than it currently is.

Jason Kottke of Kottke.org

One of the first serious bloggers — he set up shop at kottke.org in 1998 — Jason Kottke never seems to get the props he deserves. Sure, The New Yorker wrote gushingly about him in 2000 (sample quote: “Getting blogged by Kottke … is the blog equivalent of having your book featured on “Oprah”), and he won some awards in the early aughts.

But Kottke remains a key influencer to this day. In an era of slick corporate blogs with targeted niche audiences, Kottke.org is an anachronism among blogs of its reach in that it remains, primarily, about things that interest Jason Kottke. He’s reticent to write about politics, but fine art, web culture, typography, and dumb viral videos are all fair game. And there’s rarely a long post; it’s uncommon that one fills more than two paragraphs.

Kottke perseveres because, well, he’s got good taste, and he calls things early. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem — does Kottke see trends on the Web before they get big, or do they become trends because other bloggers read Kottke? — but either answer cements his relevance.

Michael Scherer of Time‘s Swampland

Michael Scherer has taken a mostly traditional approach to his education as a reporter, and found that the old recipe still produces great results online. Putting in time cutting his teeth after school at a small daily newspaper in western Massachusetts, Scherer quickly graduated to Mother Jones magazine, where he wrote a widely cited exposé about campaign finance in the 2000 presidential eleciton.

From there, he moved to Web magazine Salon, where he wrote about politics, and penned one especially sage item about the artifice of town hall meetings. At the end of 2007, Scherer joined the staff of Time magazine, covering several of the Republican candidates in the 2008 election, most memorably John McCain. After the election, Scherer landed Time‘s coveted White House beat, and now publishes in the magazine and online at Time‘s Swampland politics blog from the nation’s capital. It may not be as buzzy or trendy as younger blogs of its stripe, but with Scherer’s solid reporting behind it, it’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the ins and outs of DC politics with big-magazine polish and vibrant bloggy immediacy.

Alex Balk and Choire Sicha of The Awl

Though it’s ever insidery, no one would mistake the New York City media scene for a warm family — but a dysfunctional one, maybe. If that’s the case, Choire Sicha and Alex Balk are like the drunk uncles with the big mouths and great points. Occasionally crass, but always nuanced, their arguments and reporting have appeared in papers like the Los Angeles Times and New York Observer, and both served as editors of Radar and Gawker in the publications’ scrappier days.

Now, the pleasantly grizzled Balk and punctuation-happy Sicha are co-proprietors of The Awl, a simple, home-spun blog staffed with a stable of their friends and former coworkers including Emily Gould, Tom Scocca, Abram Sauer, and riveting newcomer Natasha Vargas-Cooper. The writers’ reps brought a loyal fan base from day one and with no one to answer to, the news commentary is sharper and the level of dialogue higher than nearly any comparable site. Distinguishing itself from the dime a dozen aggregation blogs, The Awl frequently runs reportage, such as this poignant true crime coverage of a summer-long murder trial, and has even dabbled in fiction with Marisa Meltzer’s serialized novel Managed Expectations.

Recently, The Awl took on the literary journal n+1 over a particularly verbose and unsound essay in a blistering match of wit and intellect — “Who was a reader of n+1 and who was an Internet barbarian? Who was both?” Sicha asked. And if nothing else, the response to the debate was telling: The Awl is a fan favorite and a fellow blogger’s wet dream.

Mark Copyranter of Copyranter

Is Copyranter Mad Men: The Blog? That depends on if you see the show as a scathing critique of an industry pandering to legions of mindless wasters through casual racism, sexism and straight up manipulation. So, uh, maybe. That’s the view put forth by Mark Copyranter, the advertising copywriter whose nearly 20 years in the industry and unwillingness to censor himself make him the ideal roaster of his fellow admen. When he decided it was time to relocate his beloved Gawker column, Lies Well Disguised, to a new website after over a year, that Notorious B.I.G. of blogs posted an item that read, in part: “He would prefer outlets that would let him swear more than we have—and that haven’t become, in his words, as ‘boring as piss.'” If he seems abrasive, that’s the point — the better to puncture an industry he sees as inherently dishonest.

For websites looking to pepper their content with reports of advertising controversies, including unbelievable visual content, Copyranter is the go-to source for those in the know — even Fox News dips into his well. His work has also been praised or quoted in the NY Post, Slate, Washington Post, Salon and more. If you’ve turned on a television or flipped through a magazine lately, you know there’s no shortage of mock-ready advertising. Thankfully, with Copyranter, no bad ad is safe. He’s an insider’s tireless, pissy patrolman, and for that, we’re thankful.

>>>NEXT: The best Niche Experts in their fields!