Power Hitters

Andrew Breitbart of Drudge Report, Breitbart.com, Big Hollywood,
and Big Government

Andrew Breitbart isn’t exactly a new player on the scene. As a part-time editor for The Drudge Report, he wields enormous influence over which stories thrive and which ones wither.

But over the past two years, he has quietly reinvented himself as a conservative web magnate to challenge –and maybe surpass — Arianna Huffington from the right. He biggest site is still Breitbart.com, the Web 1.5 aggregator site, but much more intriguing looking ahead are his groupblogs Big Hollywood, launched in 2008, and Big Government, launched in September. Big Hollywood has taken a mission statement the conventional wisdom might have laughed at — a conservative entertainment opinion blog!? — and proved it wrong by carved out a formidable niche.

Big Government is the rare blog to launch by breaking a first-day story that becomes a part of the national news cycle for more than a month, prompts sweeping votes by the House and the Senate, and cripples a prominent, 40-year-old NGO. Pimp suit-donning James O’Keefe’s ACORN videos aren’t exactly sterling by-the-books journalism — critics charge him with entrapment, and question the assumption that low-level workers are carrying out orders from the top. But ACORN doesn’t exactly come out of them looking good. Moreover, they opened up a major national debate, highlighted some of the blind spots of traditional media, and proved, once again, the resilience, and relevance, of Andrew Breitbart.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch

In 2005, Michael Arrington founded TechCrunch, a blog dedicated to following the latest in Internet technology and companies, after beginning his career first as a lawyer and then with a few internet start-up ventures of his own. Since the start of his tech blogging, TechCrunch has earned quite the reputation and become a kingmaker site of sorts, affecting the value of start-up companies and helping decide who will fail and who will succeed in business online.

Arrington has also done some serious reporting as well, scooping everyone on Google’s purchase of Youtube, and making a contentious decision to publish some internal Twitter documents. Arianna Huffington called Arrington “an accidental power broker” when profiling him for the 2008 Time 100, and he was also included in Forbes‘ Web Celeb 25 this year and the subject of a very impressive Wired profile.

Sarah Lacy of SarahLacy.com

With the release of her book last year, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, Sarah Lacy has shown once again that she knows how to navigate our current labyrinth of a media world. Wired magazine said of the book, “No other recent chronicle delivers such intimate, behind-the-scenes glimpses into Silicon Valley start-up life.” There are a lot of new media experts out there, but Lacy, who was there, living and reporting in Silicon Valley for the past ten years (and still is), proves that experienced old hands can still hold the edge over green young upstarts.

That experience has allowed her to transition well in a media landscape riddled with the bones of one-trick ponies. Her Valley Girl column for BusinessWeek lets her show off her impressive business reporting chops, and her tech reporting experience made Lacy a no-brainer addition to TechCrunch. Though she’s only been blogging there since February, she’s already established an impressive presence there, thanks no doubt to her substantial following from her earlier ventures. Last month she garnered a lot of attention — not all of it of good — for complaining (her enemies might say “bitching”) about not being able to get a visa in time to go do research about emerging startups in Brazil. The torrent of supportive and harsh feedback she got in response shows that she’s a polarizing figure, but this has only served to increase her profile; she’s been accused of being another self-promoter, but she sets herself apart from the pack with her sense of humor and keen expertise.

Also, Playboy.com considers her one of the “hottest women bloggers,” and that’s got to be worth something.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable

Calling Pete Cashmore a “new media expert” is an understatement. At the tender age of 20, affable Scotsman Cashmore founded one of the most visited blogs on the internet, Mashable, devoted to social media news. He’s now 24, and damn good looking, but his name is still largely unrecognizable to those outside the blogosphere. Cashmore updates his readers on what’s new and poppin’ in the social media world, and they keep coming back for more (12.5 million pageviews a month is not unimpressive).

Besides updating us on new search enginesand ridiculous iPhone apps, Cashmore also writes about a variety of pressing and interesting issues that new media brings up, like whether sex offenders should be banned from using social networking sites. If Mashable isn’t already part of your bookmarks, it should be — the blog is guaranteed to entertain while informing. In fact, researching Cashmore, it’s impossible for us not to get distracted by stuff like this.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo

A pioneer in the blogging world, Josh Marshall founded Talking Points Memo in 2000 during the Florida recount saga, but it wasn’t as visible as the flashier likes of Daily Kos for years. Still, he plugged along, and his persistence paid off: in 2008, his site became the only Internet-only news publication to get a Polk Award, received for digging deep into the patterned firings of a number of US attorneys, ultimately resulting in the ignominious exit of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

He’s had a history of dissenting, leaving The American Prospect after three years because of frequent clashes with top editors. But he may have gotten the last laugh; he’s proved himself to be more influential than most non-Internet journalists by not just reporting the news, but having an impact on it. Bloggers are often accused of thumbsucking, shuffling around news reported by hard-working journalists and throwing in a few puns and sex jokes, but Marshall is one of those hard-working journalists, and then some. Remember when Trent Lott resigned as the Senate Minority Leader and went on to lead a life of political obscurity? Josh Marshall was the guy that made that happen, by publicizing Lott’s pro-segregation comments on Talking Points Memo.TPMMuckraker, a sub-blog within TPM, carries on that ethic, regularly breaking news with a tiny staff.

The New Yorker has compared Marshall to Henry Luce and GQ has demanded that he be awarded a Pulitzer for his strong political reporting and his innovation in Internet news aggregation. He’s a proponent of the theory that journalism is a process, not a product, and he does some of his best investigations by opening his notebook to his readers and letting them critique and pass along tips. Whether or not you agree with his politics, it’s worth taking a peek to see his thorough work.

>>>NEXT: Finally, five successful Reinventors