Exclusive Interview: Andrew Breitbart Announces Launch of New “Big” Sites

And who is the target audience? Breitbart explains: “we aim to for a largely underserved audience who fiercely believe in free markets and don’t think Western Civilization sucks. If we aren’t 50% country of the country, we are damn near close. We are Tea Party-esque, with outraged Americans who have had it up to here with mainstream media. Our audience is comprised of normal, mainstream people: blue-collar workers, actors, students — black, white, straight, Gay, Jewish, Hispanic. They are at wit’s end and want to go to war with the Democratic-media complex.”

When Big Government launched back in September, it did so with what was arguably one of the biggest stories of the year — the ACORN scandal. Undercover correspondents for the site had posed as a pimp and prostitute, successfully sought government assistance at various ACORN offices, and captured the whole thing on video. There were questions about the ethics of hidden camera reporting, and the representativeness of the videos of low-level workers with respect to ACORN on the whole. Nevertheless, it was one of 2009’s splashiest and most controversial news stories, it was an embarrassment to slow-to-act outlets like Breitbart’s reviled New York Times, which assigned an editor to watch Fox News after it was criticized for missing the story — and it was a crafty promotional tool that instantly got hundreds of thousands of readers to a site that had just launched.

Does Breitbart intend to launch Big Journalism with a similar big story? Breitbart is coy: “We’ve been able to have some really great successes that the mainstream media hasn’t told you about. Our goal is to repeat that success in different sectors, different topics.”