Please forgive the victory lap, but since this will be my last post as Managing Editor, our rather astounding traffic success bears repeating: in just two and a half years, Mediaite.com welcomes nearly three million monthly unique visitors to the site. Including syndicated content like embedded video, that number more than doubles: six million unique users who are taking a monthly gander at content curated and packaged by Mediaite editors and writers. Given that we have literally spent less than $100 on a marketing or promotional budget (we tried an $80 Facebook campaign once), this is nothing short of a miraculous outcome. Nearly all of our traffic came from hard work, hustle, and being just a little bit smarter than we needed to be.

As is the case with any media entity that aims to adjudge others, Mediate’s existence has also sometimes drawn mixed emotions amongst its peers and critics. When Mediaite launched in July of 2009, nearly the entire navel-gazing set of NY-based media critics openly mocked the idea of another website entering an already too-crowded field, and not unreasonably, I might add. But the dramatically shifting media landscape of the past few years presented opportunities in which I knew could set ourselves apart.

So what were the reasons behind our success? They seem fairly self-evident to me in hindsight, but it always surprises me when fellow editors have scratched their head at our success. First, we do really smart analysis, but let me put that aside for a moment.

We knew early that a key opportunity for differentiation was “owning the buzz” one gets from learning something new in the world of digital news. In fact, we have sometimes eschewed long-form analysis in order to get our story up fast, in large part because the world of media criticism in the last few years is often banal or masturbatory. We targeted readers who, when we posted quickly, were smart enough to figure out their own analysis if we packaged and promoted stories in a way that revealed a deeper understanding of the conflict at nearly every story’s core.

We also saw an opening to focus on the burgeoning world of opinion journalism, or the intersection of media, politics and opinion. The world of “opiniotainment” is a Balkanized one in which news consumers seem to more often seek information and commentary that reinforces their pre-existing opinions. Surely neither one party nor ideology is the sole province of absurd hyperbole, or lacking in journalistic integrity. It seems like common sense but covering news, analysis and commentary from a politically agnostic perspective — without sacrificing an entertaining point of view –- was oddly a significant differentiation for us in a crowded marketplace.

The final reason behind our success, in my view, was our aggressive position on curating and embedding video and audio clips. While other sites are looking for great moments from campaign stops, press conferences and the like, we mined the constant stream of commentary and analysis from the networks themselves. You don’t have to be a “media strategist” to recognize we live in a clip culture, and Mediaite’s partnership with video platform Magnify was truly an important partnership for us. Bringing on the tireless video editor Jon Nicosia really helped set us off into a new stratosphere of relevance and influence.

The last three years have been a complete whirlwind, and it has been particularly satisfying to see the fruits of our very intense labor in a myriad of ways. In less than three years as Managing Editor, I went from being just a busy television writer/producer competing for quality work in New York City, to someone who was sought out for face-to-face meetings with Roger Ailes, Ken Jautz and Phil Griffin (the holy trinity of cable news executives), as well as many of the biggest personalities in the business. I’ve been on satellite phone calls with war correspondents in the Middle East, and interviewed some of television’s most respected on-air hosts and reporters in their midtown offices. I’ve also witnessed first-hand the more unseemly side of the promotional party circuit which fuels the sometimes too-cozy relationship between media beat writers and their subjects. As the parent of two small boys and husband to working wife, the party scene was first on my list of many sacrifices.

The list of both public and off-the-record stories to which I have become privy is a lengthy and entertaining one (hello book deal?), of which there are many anecdotes worth sharing. But in the interest of time, I will choose one that might illustrate this bizarre and, at times, hilarious world in which I have worked as Managing Editor of Mediaite.

Last year saw a number of both strange and compelling stories, many of which you may have first learned about on this very site. But who could have predicted that, as an overall news story, the sad saga of Anthony Weiner’s tweeted image (and brazen and misbegotten cover-up effort) would have been a more significant traffic driver than even the killing of Osama bin Laden.

You will recall that our old friend (and foe) Andrew Breitbart and his team of editors were first to break that story. And given how he was still somewhat smarting over the Shirley Sherrod affair, his reporting was taken with a perhaps huge dose of skepticism from the mainstream media. In fact, when we first wrote of their initial report, we added our own level of cynical plausibility as well, which resulted in a massive Twitter battle I found myself engaged in while watching Pirates of the Carribean with my kids on Memorial Day weekend evening. Such is the life of the Mediaite Managing Editor.

So how was your Memorial Day weekend of last year? Mine was spent mostly on the telephone with Andrew Breitbart trying to unpack perhaps the most confusing and bizarre of stories that was truly at the intersection of politics and social media. During a Sunday evening picnic in which other dads were busy playing Whiffle Ball™ with their sons, I was enjoying a rather spirited discussion with my editors (and at times Breitbart) trying to figure out how best to handle the potentially explosive story.

But as has been the case in many stories, what starts out as seemingly controversial often turns out to be sublimely entertaining. Breitbart and I were in fairly consistent communication during that episode and developed a level of mutual respect, especially after I found myself in the cross-hairs of both the left and the right. Mr. Breitbart returned a phone call to me after a cross-country flight that brought him to NY, just minutes before Anthony Weiner was scheduled to own up to his online behavior. I suggested to Breitbart that he attend the press conference himself, which of course he did, and became the warm-up act in what was one of the strangest and most entertaining media moments of the last year.

I have learned a lot about media and politics while in this role, but no greater lesson than the stubbornness of ignorance. Put another way, all too often in political media, the stronger the argument, the weaker is the case. The more positive side to that equation, however, is that news consumers are actually much smarter than the content created by most editors, writers and producers. Treating a potential audience with respect and expected intelligence (while not being boring) is almost always a recipe for success. It’s a shame that it’s not always followed.

First and foremost, I need to thank founder Dan Abrams for giving me the opportunity to lead a small but incredibly talented and hard working team of writers and editors who worked very hard to create something so influential out of nothing. Secondly, I have to thank Rachel Sklar, who appeared on a cable news program I was writing and producing, for making the initial introduction. And I would be remiss not to mention the original team, many of whom were assembled and joined by Skalr, including Steve Krakauer, Glynnis MacNicol, Robert Quigley and Tommy Christopher, as well as only slightly later additions such as the aforementioned Nicosia, Frances Martel and Jon Bershad. There are many other talented staff members who have come through, nearly all of whom I have enjoyed working with immensely, as well as the current all-star staff of Alex Alvarez, Jamie Crugnale and Nando DiFino, who I am sure will ably drive the site’s continued success. I am quite confident that the site will continue to flourish and grow, whoever is in charge.

I intend to continue contributing to Mediaite as a columnist, but only occasionally and in my free time. Until then, I encourage you to follow me on Twitter, and hey, keep reaching for the stars!

Kurtz put together a panel featuring Mediaite Editor-at-Large Rachel Sklar and Syracuse University’s Robert Thompson to discuss the power of Stewart’s influence on the political media narrative.

RELATED: Jon Stewart: Demagogue Or The Most Rational Man On Television?

“He is doing real political satire,” Thompson observed. “In the mass media on television, we have not had a lot of that. Before SNL we had Johnny Carson. He told jokes about politics but certainly wasn’t a political satirist. Even Saturday Night Live, Chevy Chase falling down like Gerald Ford. That was hardly real political satire. For the past several years, Jon Stewart has been doing real essays. Most of his show was about politics, he’s got evidence and clips, and he’s got attitude and maybe that’s what journalists are afraid to do is to cop the attitude that he’s got. I think reporters should be doing in the journalistic idiom a lot more of the kind of thing that Jon Stewart does four nights a week in the comic idiom, which is really bringing these sort of essays together and giving us the evidence of what he’s talking about.”

Sklar noted that Stewart wasn’t the only political satire powerhouse on television. “If you stay up the extra half-hour and watch Stephen Colbert, he lands some pretty amazing, deft punches.”

Watch Kurtz’s panel discuss the influence of political comedy below via CNN:

The ‘Women In Tech’ panel at TCDisrupt SF 2010 was added in response to a dialogue with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington about the ratio of women to men represented onstage at tech conferences (see here, here and here). It was…feisty! There were certainly some strong opinions on the issue, and multiple viewpoints on the best way to acknowledge and address it. While the ideal, of course, is to have awesome women talking onstage about anything other than this topic, it did start a conversation, about which many people disagreed but few could ignore. And it got some great women onstage presenting who would otherwise not have attended. Fundamentally, it changed the ratio – and was a factor in changing the ratio in a multitude of real, specific ways going forward. For that, feisty though it was, I really can’t thank Michael Arrington and Sarah Lacy enough.

A year later, I’ve pulled together a transcript of the panel for posterity – and a great counterpoint to where we were, and how far we’ve come. I’m happy to report that much of what is debated on this panel seems ludicrously out of date today. Either way, if you have time to kill and a bottle of wine to kill along with it, this makes for some good reading – and good watching, if you are so inclined (see the video here). TechCrunch Disrupt’s Women In Tech Panel Participants: Rachel Sklar, Mediaite Editor-at-Large and co-founder of Change The Ratio; Lauren Leto, founder of Bnter and Texts From Last Night; Cyan Banister, founder of Zivity; Sara Chipps, founder of GirlDevelopIt; Leila Janah, founder of Samasource; Michelle Greer, web strategist and tech-scene veteran, and moderated by Sarah Lacy, TechCrunch columnist and author of Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos.

— Rachel Sklar

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

SARAH: First of all, some people on this panel would have you believe that we need to raise awareness that there is not enough women in tech. So, I just want to get this done really quickly. Can we get a show of hands in the audience: anyone who is shocked that there’s more men than women working in tech? Anyone who is shocked at the news that there’s more men in leadership positions than women? All right, one guy in the back. Ok, I suggest you look around the room. Ok, you’re not shocked anymore. Now that it’s not an awareness problem that there’s more men in tech than women, let’s talk about what we’re going to get done today other than raise awareness.

As Eric alluded to this isn’t a panel I thought we should have. I don’t like women being tokens on stage. I have an issue with it and that’s what’s going on here. Mike asked me to do it. Essentially we’re here because you [Rachel Sklar] think TechCrunch is holding down women. That’s what started all this.

RACHEL: Oh, come now. That’s not what I said. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about the dearth of leadership positions for women in the tech community. And I started an initiative called Change The Ratio, which addresses the ratio that you just pointed out and is very visible here.

Before we get into this I actually think it’s important to say that I actually think that this is a great panel, I’m psyched to be on it. I’m psyched to see all these people on it who might not have been added to other panels. I appreciate being invited and I think it’s awesome that the needle is now being moved. The ratio is being changed because you– because Michael Arrington–made the decision to see the issue and make it happen. So, my quote in the Wall Street Journal was I wanted to raise awareness so that people would see an event like TechCrunch Disrupt and not be able to not notice the overwhelming maleness of the line-up.
I mean, if we’re getting into it, it’s really hard to find conferences, panels, magazine articles, where women have even close to gender parity. We’re not talking about 50/50, 60/40, 70/30—

SARAH: I’m not disagreeing with you. As I said, and the audience obviously agrees, this isn’t news to everyone. We can pick up a magazine, we can see this. I’ve been a reporter for 15 years. I mean, I know I’ve written more men in business than women in business. We try every year to get as many women on a panel as possible. What’s the awareness problem?

RACHEL: Well, I guess there must be one –

NEXT: Is there one?

Morgan took turns asking the panel whether O’Donnell was correct in walking out of his interview after questions about gay marriage, and later accusing him of sexual harassment. Sklar, who got the first shot at answering, assured Morgan that he was “definitely not guilty,” and that O’Donnell was merely concerned that answering the question would have “engaged actual policy.” More importantly, she later added that it was an example of the impact Sarah Palin‘s attitude towards the media had had on some on the right, who choose to antagonize in a blatant way.

Poniewozik agreed that no sexism was involved, but was adamant in highlighting the fact that Morgan was not exactly a victim by any means, given that he was just hosting a segment entirely about his own persona. “Under those circumstances,” Morgan retorted, “I’ve got no choice but to respond and defend my honor!” He then turned to Allred, who he noted was particularly quiet, and asked, “Did I breach her civil rights? Was I a sexist pig?”

“Not guilty!” Allred assured him, adding that her claims were “nonsense” and made her “angry” because it trivialized the meaning of sexual harassment so that when real victims of it protested, they were ignored. Morgan repeated a claim he made to Mediaite earlier in the week at that, that such slander was “borderline actionable,” which once again prompted Poniewozik to jump in. “This isn’t quite a Nixon/Frost moment,” he joked, noting again that it worked out in “Piers’ and CNN’s benefit.” Morgan ceded the point as a final one, ending the segment saying, “I will plead guilty to the fact that this has been very good for me, for my show, for ratings, and if there are any other politicians who want to come on and walk out in ridiculous circumstances such as these, I’m your man… long may we all be talking about me.”

The segment via CNN below:

It paid off. In the bottom of the ninth, with the Mets trailing the Angels by a run at Shea Stadium, a pinch-hitting Marlon Anderson drove a 3-1 pitch into right-center. The outfielder misplayed it. Anderson, not known for his baserunning, motored around the bases, meeting the tag at home plate. He smashed into the catcher, busting his lip – and forcing the game into extra innings.

In the top of the tenth, a Darin Erstad single put the Angels up a run. In the bottom of the inning, with two outs, two runners on and a full count, Cliff Floyd drove a ball over the right field fence, winning the game for the Mets.

That game in June 2005 rewarded patience – and baseball fans. Well, Mets fans anyway. It rewarded Anthony De Rosa, a New Jersey native, Rutgers grad, and Mets fan in the original sense of the term: fanatic. De Rosa outlasted several of his friends that night, watching every pitch.

At the time, De Rosa was writing regularly for MetsBlog.com; he would go on to found his own Mets blog, HotFootBlog. The guy loves the Mets, and the way he expressed his love at that point was by writing about them.

It was an offshoot, in a way, from his early days exploring the Internet. He is enough of an online veteran to draw a distinction between the old Internet, with its BBS‘s (Wikipedia is helpful on that one, youngsters) and online communities like Compuserve and Prodigy, and the Web. He particularly notes pre-Huffington, pre-Time Warner AOL – a once-dominant force that seemed determined to bring the bite-sized web in-house. That community was formative for De Rosa.

“I think the point I realized [the web] was a mass medium was when AOL came around,” De Rosa told me recently. “You started to see people use it more as a way to put up things that they were interested in. You started to see people gather around celebrities or world politics or technology…. Now the communities were dictating what was interesting to them. They were talking amongst themselves.”

An engaged De Rosa joined those conversations: “I started to see that that communication about information would start to be a more social thing – that it would be going from top-down to flip that on its end.”

Little did he know he’d be one of the people doing the flipping.

From writing casually for a few Mets blogs, he’s now a juggernaut in the world of social media and – particularly of late – in using it to curate the news. He’s been an invited speaker at industry conferences like SxSW, Social Media Week, and Toronto’s Mesh. In the past two months alone, he was quoted by David Carr in the Times, cited by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, interviewed Times‘ chief Bill Keller (generating a maelstrom of discussion online), and been praised by the editor of Salon.

He has 8,200-plus followers on Twitter (impressive for a non-celebrity), is included on 626 Twitter lists (very impressive for a non-celebrity) and has a stunningly high Klout score of 81 (what comes after “very?”).

But what he’s perhaps best known for is Tumblr, a platform now seeing 8.4 billion monthly pageviews. The Times proclaimed him “the undisputed king” of Tumblr, deservedly so. Mashable named his blog, SoupSoup, one of the best tumblogs of 2008; it’s currently one of the top 250 blogs in the world according to Technorati. It has nearly 30,000 posts, with an average of 22 posts per day since its inception in late October, 2007. The number of followers a blog on Tumblr has isn’t public; De Rosa indicated that he’s currently “just short of 25,000.”

In other words, between his Tumblr followers and his Twitter audience, more people see De Rosa’s updates than attended that Mets game. That’s what you call a platform.

SOUP AT WORK

De Rosa does have a day job. He’s Product Manager for Reuters Media, a position that affords (necessitates?) such a robust online life. Where other bosses might shy away from an employee so active on social media, De Rosa and his employers saw the advantages – particularly, increased engagement with Reuters content, including assuring that De Rosa had his own space to write. A recent interview he conducted with outgoing Times editor Bill Keller on that Reuters blog, next to Reuters’ ads, created a maelstrom of online commentary and sharing – in part because of Keller’s steadfast commitment to keeping social media at arm’s length. Reuters opens doors for De Rosa, to be sure, but his personal platform pulls back the window shades.

Actually, De Rosa seems them as platforms, plural. Each is distinct: the content he pushes out to Twitter is not necessarily the content he shares on Tumblr. This isn’t a ploy to force people into using Twitter or Tumblr – it’s a recognition and utilization of each platform’s strengths. (He admits that he’s less active on Facebook, in part because of the time demands produced by generating unique content on two platforms already.)

A decision to build audiences on two platforms doesn’t automatically create a large combined audience, of course. De Rosa seems as mystified at how the audience arose as anyone else, attributing it to the regularity of his updates and his reblogging and retweeting. But, again, that doesn’t automatically create an audience either.

Here’s Salon’s Editor-At-Large, Joan Walsh, describing her media diet to The Atlantic Wire yesterday:

The crazy thing that happens on Twitter–it’s an old school journalist’s worst nightmare–is that people are just spreading rumors. So having good journalists (Anthony De Rosa comes to mind) who are filters and say either “I got someone on the phone to confirm this” or “The New York Times has confirmed ‘X’” is important.

What she calls filtering, others (myself included) might call curation. It’s picking out interesting items of information, sharing, validating and correcting them on the fly. “Filter” is passive. What De Rosa does isn’t passive.

The genius of Twitter and Tumblr as platforms is how easy they make curation. In each, a single click pushes a single bit of information out to one’s own followers. It’s as immediate an implementation of Dave Winer‘s law of the Internet – “the more you send them away the more they come back” – as you can get. But you have to send them somewhere good.

That’s what De Rosa excels at. As Walsh notes, you can trust where he sends you. And if he shouldn’t have sent you there, he explains that, and explains why. If he’s not sure the information is accurate, he tells you that, too. That’s the authority at the heart of Walsh’s statement.

Then, there’s finding things to share. De Rosa has an experienced eye for what’s interesting in global politics, and the media, and the web, and sports, and cultural events, and New York City – and so on. He also has sophisticated streams of information. There’s the Reuters wire, which must be the equivalent for De Rosa of giving The Wire‘s Bubbles a heroin IV. There’s who he follows on Tumblr.

And there are the 1,300 people he follows on Twitter. I asked him about that one; the stream from the 400 or so I follow is often overwhelming. His secret is lists. He’s maxed out his twenty personally-selected lists (“…the thing that kind of annoys me about Twitter is you’re only allowed to have twenty lists…”) and follows another… well, a lot. Lists allow him to filter out the noise from the raw stream; he isolates those focused on particular topics as a “monitoring tool.” He considers Twitter lists to be fairly equivalent to the Reuters wire – even in terms of early accuracy. “At the end of the day, the messages that are being posted [on Twitter] aren’t any different than when you go to sources and you talk to them,” he points out. “You still have to connect the dots and make sure that information is reliable.”

(After I’d interviewed De Rosa, ReadWriteWeb posted an article indicating that Twitter itself had only a small number of “power users” working for the company. They defined “power users” as those with more Twitter lists. Oh, and I found that link on De Rosa’s Twitter feed.)

The roadblock, then, is the old-fashioned journalism, that work that Joan Walsh values. Like others – including NPR’s Andy Carvin, with whom De Rosa is sometimes compared – De Rosa wishes that Twitter had a better system for separating the wheat from the chaff more quickly.

It has one. Users like @AntDeRosa.

EXPLORING THE PLATFORM
In July of 2009, De Rosa was hired at Mediaite as one of the site’s inaugural columnists; in March of last year, sports blogging juggernaut SBNation picked him up as editor-in-chief of the site’s Tumblr. “Anthony was one of the first people hired because of what they achieved on Tumblr,” says Rachel Sklar, Mediaite’s editor-at-large – originally hiring DeRosa – and advisor to start-ups including SBNation. That’s in part because of how closely tied to Tumblr his identity was: “For a long time, I only knew him as ‘Soup.’”

Like Mark Coatney, who was spirited away from Newsweek’s Tumblr to work for Tumblr itself, De Rosa positioned himself as both master of the platform – and innovator in how it was used.

In 2009, De Rosa partnered with Richard Blakeley (then editor-in-chief of Gawker.TV) on Neighborhoodr, a Tumblr-based local news tool. The mandate of Neighborhoodr is simple: empower local residents to share updates about their communities quickly and easily. The site now covers 113 cities in the United States and 32 cities internationally. In 2010, TheNextWeb declared that “Neighborhoodr gets it right as a hyperlocal news source.”

De Rosa gets it right as a news source, too. In February, NBC New York pegged him as one of the twenty best local news sources on Twitter in NYC. And then there’s that Klout score. Debate aside, the tool reflects a genuine level of influence. De Rosa’s score of 81 compares favorably to the New Yorker‘s Susan Orlean with a score of 67 and the Times‘ David Pogue at 76. He’s far closer, in fact, to the Klout score of 85 maintained by none other than Ashton Kutcher.

And on Twitter, Kutcher has 735 times as many followers. (Between the time this piece was finalized and when it was published, SBNation announced a new advisor: Ashton Kutcher.)

WHY HE DOES WHAT HE DOES

Now, the story behind his tumblog’s name, SoupSoup.

Short version: his friends have called him Soup since middle school. Long version: it’s because he saved someone from choking.

One day at school during lunch, Anthony was sitting at the same table as a girl who began to choke on a chunk of chicken from her chicken noodle soup. Somewhere (a movie? TV show?) he’d come across the Heimlich maneuver. He came up behind her and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, forced the chicken loose. From that day forward he was Soup. Old friends still call him that; he answers to it.

(Why SoupSoup? Why doubled? It’s an Internet tale told so many times before: “Soup” was taken.)

The point of the story is this: a simple piece of information that he’d come across potentially saved someone’s life.

Not to be melodramatic, but sharing similar bits pieces of information has become something of an obsession of De Rosa’s. If you’ve just recently come to know him, it’s probably because of the curation he’s done around the events of the Arab Spring. He’s vastly broadened his audience by performing that simple task, passing on information – particularly about what’s happening in the Middle East and North Africa. During Tahrir Square, during the run-up to military action in Libya, now with the crackdown in Syria – De Rosa has been a whirlwind of links from sources in multiple languages, moderating and refining on the fly. There’s an urgency to it that makes clear he’s not simply sharing news to build his Klout score.

I asked him why he expends so much effort on these events.

I think it’s a combination of newsworthiness and how big an effect that particular news can have on the world as a whole. I think the Middle East and what’s happening in North Africa is having a wide-ranging effect. I try to focus on things I think have will have a lot of scale and be of interest to as many people as possible.

Americans have a short attention span. But I think it’s an important story to monitor because it’s affecting us in ways we may not even realize. Maybe I try to advocate a little, but I think you can acknowledge you have biases to sorts of news you think are important.

On social networks, there’s no need to worry about ratings or attracting an audience. People are more interested in getting information.

He went on.

If people are informed – even if it’s just showing them that the rest of the world supports what they’re doing – I feel like that’s where I could do my life’s work. Continuing to be part of that conversation that allows others with more influence or power to enact change.

He’s saying, in effect, that there’s always something worthy of our attention there. To the extent that he can keep presenting those bits of news – mixed in with information about a lot of other things sometimes, in a homogeneous flood at others – he can keep American (and other Western) eyes flitting, however quickly, over something that he recognizes as important. And the people on the ground know that they’ve been seen.

Doing so effectively requires something of the curator as well: tenacity predicated on real interest. That’s the standard De Rosa brings to his curation. It’s his sweet spot.

After all, this is the guy whose favorite baseball game was one where he had the passion and will to stick with it through a long rain delay, because he loves the game and he loves the Mets. God knows that sticking with the Mets doesn’t always bear fruit. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it’s a game that you remember the rest of your life.

Behar had a bit of fun at Current TV’s expense, joking about not being able to even find it. Sklar had a more diplomatic take on what Olbermann could do for Al Gore‘s less-than-flourishing (and, apparently, hard to find) network:

They need something. I mean, this is a great move for Olbermann, too. He gets to say that… You know, Current is starting from, you know, not the position of being the highest-rated network on cable… so he’s going to be able to say he was able to say “I build up a network, again.” ‘Cause he’s going to bring people in. And Olbermann is most comfortable as an underdog; he really is.

Behar then discussed whether the new Powers That Be at Comcast let Olbermann go because they had taken issue with him, personally, but Sklar quite accurately pointed out that Olbermann has been “brewing discontent there (at MSNBC) for some time now,” long before Comcast stepped into the picture.

Watch the segment for yourselves, via HLN:

He explained the fact that the segment was rooted in satire, but that some still thought he was literally claiming that these were the actual worst people in the world, and “there’s potential danger in that.”

Olbermann explained that the purposes of the segment,  ”criticism, sarcasm, satire, calling out, even ridiculing,” remain “relevant and important, maybe more so now than ever before,” and quoted philosopher Henri Bergson: “Laughter is a social sanction against inflexible behavior.”

The spirit of the segment will remain, but he did not announce the new name for the segment. Olbermann began the old “Worst Persons” segment with a literary reference, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so I would suggest a name with a similar, perhaps more relevant literary pedigree: Double-Plus-Unbest Person.

Here’s Olbermann’s announcement, from MSNBC:

Sklar criticized Sarah Palin for an “irresponsible use of imagery” with her controversial congressional target map, but did not say the shooting was Palin’s fault. Instead she hoped Palin would say “I’m a leader, I should lead responsibly and set a great example” and avoid the use of such images in the future. When asked whether he was willing to tone down his language in the future, Malzberg disputed the premise that his language needed toning down. Furthermore, with a President who is “still going to try to rule everything he wants to rule,” Malzberg believed toning down his language would hinder his ability to adequately combat Obama’s agenda.

An interesting discussion, and one that will likely continue as more is learned about how much potentially violent rhetoric, if any, actually influenced the shooter.

Watch the clip from CNN below:

Sources with knowledge of the decision have told AllYourTV that MSNBC host and commentator Keith Olbermann is expected to announce on Monday’s show he is permanently dropping the “Worst Persons In The World” segment from “Countdown,” effective immediately.

A spokesman for MSNBC told us that the “report isn’t correct….no decision has been made,” and referred us to Olbermann’s Twitter feed from last night:

W/that & news we’ll have an announcement about “Worst Persons” on Monday’s show, I thank you all for your support this terrible weekend

While MSNBC’s denial states that it’s not a done deal, it leaves open the possibility that the segment will be eliminated. Given the events of this past weekend, and Olbermann’s own pledge on Saturday to tone things down, this would not be a surprising move. In any case, it certainly appears to be under serious consideration.

This isn’t the first time that the firebreathing host has re-thought the signature segment. Following criticism from The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, Olbermann shelved the segment for a few weeks, and when he returned it, added a parenthetical subtitle: Worst Person in the World (not really).

Cynics might see this as a ploy to shame right-wing commentators, while laying quick claim to the moral high ground, but I don’t think that’s the case. Given the gravity of recent events, he’s due the presumption that this is the result of serious self-reflection. That is not to say that he won’t also urge others to follow his lead in cooling their jets, but that’s a secondary consideration.

While there’s no indication that the killer was motivated by anything other than his own lunacy, it’s only natural that the intersection of violence with politics would make use think about re-drawing the lines around political discourse. That re-drawing, though, should be done finely. For example, it illustrates the fact that using the image of a bullseye on an electoral map is in unnecessarily poor taste, when a flag or a pushpin would be just fine.

The real opportunity here, though, is to assess the degree to which we enforce existing boundaries. To use the much-discussed map issue again, there were many who agreed at the time that the Sarah Palin “crosshair map” crossed the line, including Rep. Giffords. Such criticisms, though, were marginalized as politically motivated, or deflected with flippant analogies. It is here that our current system of discourse failed, not in drawing the lines, but in enforcing them.

The flip side to that is the degree to which people have rushed to assign blame for this tragedy on Palin, when no such causal link exists.

Ironically, it was with Olbermann’s “Worst Persons” segment that I illustrated the need not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, when I wrote of his Special Comment:

So, while we should continue to police irresponsible statements like Sharron Angle’s “2nd Amendment remedies,” or Keith Olbermann’s own Hillary Clinton beatdown scenario, orGlenn Beck’s Pelosi-poisoning fantasies, there is a place for violent imagery in politics. In fact, it’s on Keith Olbermann’s show. Every night, Olbermann introduces the best segment of the show by saying “Get out your pitchforks and torches…”

The line is a reference to the frightened, angry villagers in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and is clearly meant to be ironic, just as Palin’s map was clearly meant metaphorically. That some metaphors are in poorer taste than others is a fact that should be governed by their merits, not the ability of lunatics to discern them.

I stand by the sentiment, and the one I expressed the first time Olbermann suspended the segment. It’s true, Olbermann sometimes crosses the line during that segment, but he also crosses it without it. The segment isn’t the problem, nor are the currently-drawn lines of decency. It is the unwillingness of people to remain within them, or to call someone out for crossing them just because they’re on your “side.”

The crowning irony is that segments like “Worst Persons in the World,” or even Bill O’Reilly‘s “Pinheads and Patriots,” are the very vehicles by which those lines are enforced. Eliminating them isn’t the answer, doing them better is.

Update: Keith Olbermann has issued a similar denial via his Twitter feed:

Also a site called Allyourtv has posted a story saying we are dropping Worsts. A fabrication. Haven’t even had the 1st show meeting today

Here is Olbermann’s “Special Comment,” from MSNBC: (Transcript here)

The remark Olbermann refers to, for which he later apologized to our own Rachel Sklar, is at about the 3 minute mark in this clip, where he tells Howard Fineman that the Democrats’ solution to Hillary Clinton was “Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.”

As Rachel Maddow says, this doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, so try to stay with me on this. Any fair-minded person would have to acknowledge that this tragedy, coupled with Rep. Giffords’ inclusion on Sarah Palin‘s “crosshair map,” naturally leads one to connect the two, at least cognitively. This is especially true given the fact that Giffords herself spoke out about the use of that imagery.

It is also true that the “crosshair map” was grossly irresponsible. While Olbermann talks about rethinking the use of terms like “targeting” in electoral politics, the image of crosshairs is a considerably more on-the-nose evocation of assassination than that loose metaphor. It’s arguably worse than the use of bullseyes, which are inert representations of a target, rather than the interactive tool used in targeting. For all of those reasons, she shouldn’t have used it, and was rightly condemned for it. Despite all that, I doubt anyone thinks her intent was to incite violence, and her refusal to change it was likely a stubborn attempt to reinforce that point.

Meanwhile, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas immediately tried to hang this crime on the “American Taliban,” coincidentally the name of his book, but it turns out he also employed some uncomfortable rhetoric on Giffords’ district. He put her on his “Target List,” bolded for emphasis, and used the “bullseye” metaphor, as well. It’s not exactly the same as what Palin did, but given today’s events, it is ample cause for reflection.

It is here that Keith Olbermann has a point. When passions run as high as they do in politics, we should all take deep breaths and think about what we’re saying. When a tragedy like this occurs, so closely paralleled by our political disagreements, it is entirely appropriate to reflect on our own inability to recognize the humanity of those with whom we disagree.

But it’s also important to recognize that these were the actions of a lunatic, and even if the alleged shooter ends up saying, “I did it because of Palin’s map,” or “Markos Moulitsas painted the bullseye for me,” they will still be the actions of a lunatic. Only a lunatic opens fire on a crowd of people at a supermarket, and he doesn’t do it out of a failure to appreciate nuance and metaphor.

So, while we should continue to police irresponsible statements like Sharron Angle‘s “2nd Amendment remedies,” or Keith Olbermann’s own Hillary Clinton beatdown scenario, or Glenn Beck‘s Pelosi-poisoning fantasies, there is a place for violent imagery in politics. In fact, it’s on Keith Olbermann’s show. Every night, Olbermann introduces the best segment of the show by saying “Get out your pitchforks and torches…”

The line is a reference to the frightened, angry villagers in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and is clearly meant to be ironic, just as Palin’s map was clearly meant metaphorically. That some metaphors are in poorer taste than others is a fact that should be governed by their merits, not the ability of lunatics to discern them.

If you don’t know any cool kids, however, you could do worse than the Mediaite staff’s out-of-the-box picks of our favorite Holiday flicks. Now, get thee to Netflix!

While there was very little duplication, one film that shows up twice on our list (once with a handy drinking game!) was also the subject of much background chatter. Love, Actually was the most frequently mentioned, and is probably the runner-up on many of our lists. (Oddly, the other big winner of our rundown is John Amos, who also makes two appearances.) The remaining selections veer from odd to odder, but hopefully, that’s the fun of this list. Let us know your favorites in the comments section.

Coming to America - Mediaite Contributing Editor Frances Martel

It’s not primarily a holiday movie, and I doubt the writers intended it to be interpreted as a full-throated Reagan-era hymn to America, but Coming to America exemplifies the holiday spirit better, to me, than any other “winter in New York” feel-goods out there.

A prince and his brother travel to a faraway land to find the American dream… capture her and present her as the new leader of their country. Ok, so the bright-eyed immigrant analogies don’t 100% work, but good ol’ Prince Akeem does his best to emulate a bootstraps experience of working hard, learning the culture, and rubbing shoulders with an “elite” (small business owners) that calls him “Kunta Kinte” and wears entirely too much product in their hair.

Their shared winter, and Akeem’s love interest’s insistence on treating him well, even at a holiday party, simply because of his drive to “make it,” is all too familiar a story to a kid who grew up sharing her Christmases with recent Caribbean arrivals who were just thankful to be treated as equals, the way Akeem so joyfully expresses. That, and watching Arsenio Hall get rejected never gets old.

Love, Actually – Mediaite Contributing Editor Jon Bershad

Jingle All the Way – Mediaite Editor Matt Schneider

Love, Actually – Mediaite TV Editor Mark Joyella

The Sound of Music – Mediaite Editor-at-Large Rachel Sklar

Ordinary People – Mediaite Managing Editor Colby Hall

Die Hard and Die Hard 2: Die Harder – Mediaite Political Editor And White House Correspondent Tommy Christopher

]]> http://www.mediaite.com/online/mediaite-presents-our-favorite-christmasholiday-themed-movies/feed/ 20 http://www.mediaite.com/tv/mediaite-on-joy-behar-talking-tsa-cavity-searches-and-wills-kate/ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/mediaite-on-joy-behar-talking-tsa-cavity-searches-and-wills-kate/#comments Fri, 26 Nov 2010 14:33:26 +0000 Rachel Sklar http://www.mediaite.com/?p=203769 Earlier this week I was invited to join Joy Behar on her eponymous show to discuss some of the more pressing issues of the day: Was the TSA pushing it too far? Were Prince William and Kate Middleton headed for a rocky road? What did we really think of Bristol on “Dancing With The Stars?” I was joined by Laura Bennett, “Project Runway” designer and author of “Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?: A Mother’s Guide To Sanity in Stilettos,” and comedian Jamie Kilstein, co-host of Citizen Radio. A sampling:

On the TSA, darkly:

RACHEL SKLAR, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, MEDIATE.COM: I mean, that’s the big question right now, right? And that it feels like the TSA isn’t quite getting that balance right. I mean, there just has to be limits on this. You wonder if the TSA is focusing so much energy on these ridiculous scans and searches of people who clearly are not a danger, then, you know, all those resources are in the wrong place. So, what’s getting through? What are they not focusing on?

On creativity vs. airport security:

The notion of putting something in a cavity isn`t new. It`s not like this just like came up. I mean, it`s certainly been done before in smuggling, has it not?

On a London bishop taking to Facebook to predict the demise of the Wills & Kate marriage:

This story is not like a bishop made a pronouncement on a wedding that has yet to take place. The story is that he posted this to his Facebook page.

On the “Dancing With The Stars” kerfuffle:

Cheating on “Dancing With The Stars” shall not stand!

Also not to be missed: Jamie Kilstein’s epic rant against Sarah Palin via George W. Bush, if just for sheer out-of-left-field raw, visceral emotion. Watch the whole thing below:

VELSHI: This is not really about laws. This is more about, is it wise in this economy to be trashing your boss on Facebook?

SKLAR: You’ve hit it exactly. There is the legal point, and then there is just good advice. And good advice is, just watch what you say on Facebook, on Twitter, on social networks, because being sued is not fun. Filing a lawsuit is not fun. And being fired and having to do all of those things is not fun. So just avoid it.

VELSHI: Now, from your perspective as a media observer and a media critic, there is something about this whole thing, is that somebody gets fired and then they challenge it. And we want to see how far we can push that envelope. Where do you stand on that side of things? Should this person have had the right to criticize her boss on social media?

SKLAR: Well, clearly, yes. Right? She won the case. And I think that it’s an important ruling, because what it says is that that is public conversation, but it’s in the [protected] realm. It’s like water-cooler conversation, and just like water-cooler conversation in an office…[i]t was on a Facebook wall where other employees jumped in. So it was deemed to be sort of protected workplace conversation. That doesn’t mean that you’re free to say, “My boss is an idiot,” “My boss is ugly,” “My boss is stupid,” “My boss has bad hair.” Those are things that, you know, you push the envelope a little bit. But at the very least, if you must criticize on Facebook – and there’s by no means any reason to believe that non-unionized employees are protected – you might want to make sure you keep it to specific policy considerations.

Then I made fun of Facebook’s statement on the ruling where they say “Just as in your offline life, there are people you want to be more open with than others, which is why Facebook gives you complete control over how you share information.” Oh that’s right, Facebook totally wants us to be super-duper private. For more information on this, Geekosystem has an excellent breakdown. Watch below.

Related:
Facebook Posts by Employees are Legally Protected Free Speech, Federal Ruling Finds [Geekosystem]
Transcript: Rachel Sklar with Ali Velshi on CNN [Lexis-Nexis]

While Carr argued that the impact of cable news is limited to five million viewers a night and that most Americans aren’t paying attention to cable news, Sklar responded:

“We live in a clip culture now — with the rise of embeddable code, the distribution of all these cable news clips, and frankly Stewart and Colbert, just goes so wide. We do a lot of the clip culture stuff at Mediaite; the Huffington Post, it’s part of their bread and butter; Gawker launched Gawker TV because of it. It’s a different world out there and so the reach is enormous and is amplified by Twitter. So your water cooler moments are a result of next-day pickup. And of course the media is paying attention to that and that drives the news cycle on a larger level.”

Watch below:

Ratigan is MSNBC’s 4pmET host, and also has started a podcast on his website, DylanRatigan.com. We’ll talk midterms and a lot more – expect some NSFW content. Speaking of, Ashley Madison president and CEO Biderman is a regular on Howard Stern and has been compared to Hitler by Joy Behar on The View. If you’re not familiar with the site…check it out. And Fost is the author of the very timely book Giants Past & Present (follow him on Twitter here).

Also, it’s Glynnis’ last show, and we’ve got a special surprise…

Glynnis MacNicol, Steve Krakauer and Rachel Sklar host the live-streamed call-in show.

Watch us live here on this page at 3:15pmET, or check it out at www.livestream.com/mediaite.

See you at 2:30pmET!

Rally For Sanity And/Or Fear (1 of 50)

Next ►

 

p.s. It’s bigger than the Glenn Beck slideshow.

While Emme’s main concern was the lack of editorial filter that allowed such a hateful post to be put up, Sklar rightfully points out that the biggest problem with the post is its stunning lack of research and facts. That said, they both agree that at the very least, it’s allowed for a much-needed dialogue.

Related:
Marie Claire EIC Defends ‘Fatties Are Gross’ Blog Post [Styleite]
Mike & Molly Creator Responds To Marie Claire’s ‘Fatties’ Post [Styleite]

(This post originally appeared on Styleite.com)

With Crowley, we’ll talk about the various midterm races that are winding down, as well as CNN’s coverage (and “Matrix”) on Election Night. Rovell will talk about the new LeBron ad, World Series and more. Follow Crowley on Twitter here, and Rovell here.

Glynnis MacNicol, Steve Krakauer and Rachel Sklar host the live-streamed call-in show.

Watch us live here on this page at 3:15pmET, or check it out at www.livestream.com/mediaite.

See you at 3:15pmET!

Silicon Alley Insider sets up their Top 100 list:

It’s been an awesome year for New York City tech.

From the explosive growth of Foursquare, to the increasing influence of new-media power-houses like Gawker and Huffington Post, to the booming sales of Gilt Groupe, AppNexus, Buddy Media, MediaMath, and many others, to the further development of a vibrant angel and VC community, the city’s tech-media foundation continues to get stronger.

If one were to take a broader look at the accomplishment of Mr. Abrams, one might add a full suite of websites that is currently earning over 7 Million monthly uniques (including syndicated content) according to Quantcast. Which is an even more impressive number when one considers that this was mostly accomplished in less than a year. All of this makes the coveted spot of #74 make total sense.

As for Ms. Sklar, what else can we say about the digital personification of both smarts and charm. If only we could get her to one day come out of her shell and share her thoughts. Like Dan, Rachel is a repeat honoree, and when the SAI Hall of Fame gets erected, she will certainly be enshrined in that virtual space as well.

Read the entire listing at SAI. Congrats to Dan, Rachel, and the editors at Silicon Alley Insider who earned a free promotion by including us on your list. Well played SAI, we expect payback during our end of the year Mediaite 50 list. You hear?

Other honorees from the Media sector include:

* Alan Meckler, WebMediaBrands
* Anil Dash and Michael Wolf, Activate
* Bess Levin, Dealbreaker
* Bob Bowman and Joe Inzerillo, Major League Baseball Advanced Media
* Dan Abrams, Mediaite
* David Carr and Brian Stelter, The New York Times
* Eric Hippeau, Greg Coleman, Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
* Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch – acquired by AOL
* Geoff Bartakovics, Tasting Table
* Glenn Beck and Christopher Balfe, The Blaze
* Jason Liebman, Howcast
* Jonah Peretti and Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed
* Lewis D’Vorkin, Forbes
* Lockhart Steele, Curbed
* Nick Denton and Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker Media
* Patrick Keane, Associated Content – acquired by Yahoo!
* Rachel Sklar, Mediaite
* Ran Harnevo, 5min Media – acquired by AOL
* Rufus Griscom, Babble
* Scott Dadich, Conde Nast
* Stephen Colvin and Tina Brown, The Daily Beast
* Strauss Zelnick, Zelnick Media
* Tim Armstrong, AOL
* Warren Webster and Brian Farnham, AOL Patch

Kotb has a new book out, How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee, so get ready for a discussion of all of that. Also, for those who are fans of a certain late night cable news show, there’s a surprise coming. Pope is the author of The Deeds Of My Fathers – his father started the National Enquirer. Simian is a reporter/producer at NY1 Noticias, and we’ll talk to him about the Chilean miners and more.

Glynnis MacNicol, Steve Krakauer and Rachel Sklar host the live-streamed call-in show.

Watch us live here on this page at 3pmET, or check it out at www.livestream.com/mediaite.

See you at 3pmET – the order will be Pope, Kotb then Simian

Van Susteren will be Skype’ing in from D.C., where we’ll talk to her about her showdowns with Gloria Allred, the midterm elections and more. Geist has a new book out next week, American Freak Show, which includes a lot of media what-ifs to talk about. And Poniewozik, who writes the Tuned In blog on Time.com, will talk Mad Men, Parker Spitzer and more. Also, we’ve got a new game to debut!

Glynnis MacNicol, Steve Krakauer and Rachel Sklar host the live-streamed call-in show.

Watch us live here on this page at 3pmET, or check it out at www.livestream.com/mediaite.

See you at 3pmET – the order will be Van Susteren, Geist and Poniewozik.

Joy Behar should be absolutely ashamed of herself for referring to Carl’s daughter as illegitimate. She’s a child and does not deserve that kind of treatment from a woman who should know better. That’s catty, it’s pissy and strikes of something that someone would say when suffering from a sudden hot flash. The only person here who’s illegitimate is Joy Behar’s hairstylist. Joy is off Carl Paladino’s Christmas card list.

That was last Monday. And apparently it worked, because Joy Behar proceeded to talk Paladino on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Turns out Joy Behar is a fan of Carl Paladino not being a fan of Joy Behar not being a fan of Carl Paladino. Here she is with Bill Maher last Tuesday, sounding very upset about being left off the Christmas card list:

BEHAR: Now this other guy, Carl Paladino, what do you know about him? He sent some really racist e-mails ahead. He forwarded these hideous, hideous — I read Bob Herbert today. It’s unbelievable stuff.

What do you think — where do they come up with these people? Go ahead.

MAHER: Joy, he was in the construction business. That’s his excuse. ‘I was in the construction business.’

BEHAR: Yes.

MAHER: ‘Of course we’re going to send racist e-mail. As a woman have you ever walked by a construction site? Of course you’re going to be accosted with all sorts of horrible things coming out of the mouths of construction people.’ And his other thing is, ‘Yes — I admit it — bad judgment.’ So here you have a guy running in New York State, which is supposed to be one of the most sophisticated states in the nation saying, “I’m in the construction business and I use bad judgment. Vote for me. These are my qualifications to be the governor of the second largest, most populist state in the country.” It’s just insane.

BEHAR: I mean, you know, I got into a big tiff with him the other day because I said he could if all of his illegitimate children voted for him and I got this really nasty response. This is what &mash; from his people. “That’s catty. It’s pissy and strikes of something that someone would say when suffering from a sudden hot flash. Joy is off Carl Paladino’s Christmas card list.”

Can you believe these idiots are actually turning on me, a comedian, for a comment like that?

MAHER: And to play the hot flash card, Joy.

BEHAR: So wrong.

So wrong, indeed. Meanwhile, it seems that exclusion from the Paladino Christmas card list is the go-to punishment for anti-Paladinites — Caputo also warned Paladino-nemesis Fred Dicker of the New York Post that he, too, was off the list. Naughty! Speaking of, Behar also discussed Paladino with actress Linda Blair, who can be pretty scary in her own right, plus wrestler Mick Foley, who may be an awesome humanitarian but whom you probably don’t want to see angry. Oh, and also with Bravo’s Andy Cohen — who can sic some Real Housewives on you, need I say more — and me. I can be very scary, too. RAWR. Our fun segment from Thursday night’s show below.

http://www.mediaite.com/?p=178068 Rick Sanchez Spectacular was a bewilderingly stupid (but fun!) way for the perceived-to-be dumbest news anchor on television to make his exit. For Cuban-Americans, the group Sanchez seemed to have been trying to defend (?) in his ill-advised rant, it was a disgrace from which it will be difficult to recover.]]> For most media consumers, yesterday’s Rick Sanchez Spectacular was a bewilderingly stupid (but fun!) way for the perceived-to-be dumbest news anchor on television to make his exit. For Cuban-Americans like me, the group Sanchez seemed to have been trying to defend (?) in his ill-advised rant, it was a disgrace from which it will be difficult to recover.

A few weeks ago, our own Rachel Sklar wrote an article describing the problematic lack of minorities on cable news. It was ahead of its time in that this topic was at the core of Sanchez’s implosion, an event that at least presents the opportunity to discuss the topic when, really, it should have (and, in this case, was) brought up long before. I approached her with some ethnic confusion of my own: after 50 years of assimilation and very little physiological differences, do Cubans count as minorities anymore? I noted that she had excluded Sanchez from her piece, the highest-profile Latin American anchor in American cable news history. We never came to a definitive conclusion on that, but the fact that he slipped under the radar led me to conclude that we had reached a point of racial transcendence where Cubans were just another white ethnic group, and that Sanchez was no more of a minority than George Stephanopoulos or Charlie Gasparino.

Apparently, Sanchez disagrees. Viscerally. And before going completely off the rails in his radio interview, he had made a valid point: racism in the workplace is subtle and often takes a keen eye to find. For any member of a minority that has had received worse service at a business or been the object of near-silent discrimination in the workplace, his words resonated. For any Cuban-American who tried to get a job in New York in the 1970s or ’80s, the words rang true. And for someone in my shoes, who had heard all the horror stories from white bosses that came before from family friends and relatives, it was very easy to see where he was coming from. What didn’t ring true, however, was that he claimed this was all still happening, at a time when it appeared almost no one remembered (or cared to remember) Sanchez’s ethnic background unless they, too, shared it, and felt obligated to carry the burden of calling him one of our own.

Before he decided to state publicly that all of his bosses were racists and the media were controlled by Jews, Sanchez was only marginally embarrassing, making silly rookie mistakes like reading straight off the teleprompter, pointlessly escaping a sinking vehicle, asking someone what meters are “in English“… typical but innocuous doltish fare. That last one is almost forgivable, in that it the standard system of measurement used in the US is called in Spanish the “English” system, and that he named his book Conventional Idiocy was like a wink to let us know he was in on the joke.

He is no longer that dolt Cuban Americans can be passively embarrassed about but secretly more than a little proud of. After all, dolt or not, Sanchez achieved what no Cuban-American– or Latin American– had done before: he was hosting the 8PM spot on CNN, the flagship cable news network. Gaffe though he may, Sanchez gaffed right through the glass ceiling.

Now one can’t help but feel his gaffe– or, rather, purely offensive invective– has somehow glued that ceiling back together. From an outsider’s perspective, the idea that Sanchez has somehow completely discredited everyone of his ethnic background seems ridiculous and, factually, it is. Believing that it will now be more difficult for Cuban Americans to get jobs in the media would be to believe in Sanchez’s version of reality, where the vast left-wing Jewish conspiracy actively works to keep minorities down. Anyone who has ever worked in any area of media and met any left-wing and/or Jewish person ever would know better than to believe that it’s true. And yet, Sanchez’s self-destruction has engendered a latent anxiety that it is through his prism that Cuban Americans in the media will be seen– a similar anxiety, one can imagine, as any minority feels when a member of their community publicly humiliates themselves. It is not new, nor is it unique, but it is certainly unnecessary. As much as Sanchez’s hard work was a point of pride for those of us in the community who find a dearth of role models in this industry (and, due to numbers alone, in any industry), this incident has set his alleged cause of racial transcendence back beyond from where it was before he came on the scene to begin with.

It’s like pre-curation: You know that what you’re going to get will be interesting and good. So far there are questions out – with some answers – to people like Jeff Jarvis, Yancy Strickler (Kickstarter), John Borthwick (Betaworks), Donald Glover (Community), Nieman Lab, Ezra Klein, Elizabeth Stark (Vowch) — and me! Co-founder Cody Brown, who founded Kommons with NYU classmate Kate Ray, sent me a question on Saturday, and caught me in a moment of weakness with this catnip for media wonks: “What was the NYC media community like before Twitter?”. I spent the next hour blurting out my response. Boom – free content for Kommons, and now, Mediaite. My answer is below, in its blurted form, free of the links I would have probably spent half an hour methodically inserting. You know what? Find your own damn links. Just kidding. But as I told Kool Kid Kody, I’d been meaning to write on this for a long time and now I am glad I did. My answer below:

Twitter really did turn everything on its head, particularly for people who were classic “bloggers.” Prior to Twitter, there was RSS of course, but being linked and mentioned in other blogs was the social currency. Things got written up, as opposed to tweeted in 140-character bites. (So, panels and parties and events would tend to get write-ups. I did a lot of that at “Eat The Press” at HuffPo, and a lot of reports on TV moments, and a lot of transcribing. Also, pre-Twitter, I remember how reporters thought it was very clever to seek out people on Facebook for quotes (that, I recall, was at one point revolutionary). This is the more narrow answer to the NYC media community question.

More broadly, though, ACCESS was just different (and when I first became active in 2008 I was steeped in the election, so my community was in NY and DC). It was like Twitter was its own little city, wherever you were from, if you were in that mix, you were in it. And it was like a little badge of membership, of commonality. Twitter has created connections between people who would not have otherwise had them (it’s how I showed up at Joe Scarborough’s book party circa March 2009 to an effusive welcome from Suzy and Jack Welch, my Twitter buds). That was back in March 2009 – when Twitter hadn’t yet “tipped”: Ashton and CNN hadn’t yet battled – Oprah hadn’t yet anointed – Maureen Dowd hadn’t yet embarrassed herself with a clueless, condescending interview with Ev and Biz. So Twitter was also a huge flattener. Before it went “mainstream” as it were, it was much more of a conversation and the attention people used to court by, say, posting comments on blogs could be gotten by @ replies. So if you were an early adopter, it was useful.

(BTW, I was an early adopter for media but not for tech – I became active in mid-2008. So for me Twitter was a huge part of covering – and consuming – the 2008 Conventions, but was totally absent from my experience during the primaries. Which up until this Kommons question, I hadn’t thought about.)

One of the big things about Twitter though was how it broke news – it subverted the gatekeeper function of the traditional media and allowed people to just shout stuff out. And so famous people Twittering became news stories (Shaq finding out he had been traded on Twitter is one.) It was also a way to break stories – if you cared more about planting a flag (“First!”) than traffic or a byline, there it was. So as people were building their own “brands” the incentives started to blur a bit, I think, too.

I wrote a lot about this stuff here, in a post that is now a relic but also, a time capsule: Pet Peeve: Journalists Opining on Twitter Who Have No Clue About Twitter

But I have to say that what seems to me to have changed things maybe even more (is that sacrilege?) was the rise of embeddable code. When I started at FishbowlNY in April 2005, there was no YouTube. There were very few people clipping TV moments, you had to see it or read about it after. (My bread and butter for a while was doing next-day write ups of The Daily Show, and I actually remember how it felt to have technology make you obsolete.) The ability to pull and embed clips from across the dial changed the distribution game, and made water-cooler moments shareable to those who had missed them – in now *created* water-cooler moments from things that would otherwise have been missed. (I remember how the clip of Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck went viral – as I can recall, that was the first real widespread “View” moment. I still credit Danny Shea at HuffPo with making The View must-watch daily TV for aggregators – he pulled a Sherri Shepard clip of the day and recognized it as a goldmine of clippable moments. Online, I feel like “clip culture” has taken over (despite my preference for the written word over video). It’s not long ago at all that the big media companies were violently opposed to permitting clips – there was NBC pulling all those clips of SNL down from YouTube (they went embeddable just a few weeks after the return after the writer’s strike, in Feb 2008, just in time to become a player in the election with Tina Fey’s “bitch is the new black” – the ability to disseminate those moments every week played a huge part in the SNL resurgence); there was Viacom pulling Stewart and Colbert off YouTube, before reluctantly coming up with their own embeddable system; and there was Hulu, finally entering the picture in March 2008 as well. NBC and MSNBC were the first to offer their stuff in embeddable, clipped form. And they saw an advantage in this in how they were picked up and disseminated. The upshot: “Next Day Pickup” became a metric. Probably the best example of a TV show that got this from the start is Jimmy Fallon. His team got that, sought out influencers, played to online interest – not in a calculated, fake-feeling way but because the Fallon team identified an audience they wanted to reach and gave that audience material that demonstrated that they understood and respected it, rather than being all, “Internets! Jimmy Fallon has deigned to notice you, now you shall post this video!” Which you have seen from other MSM types. That ain’t a winning strategy.

Anyway – there have been a lot of big game changes since I started five short years ago (I mean, really. Five years. Wow). But I do think that while Twitter was a major major game changer, the whole embeddable-code thing has also ended up being, as Joe Biden would say, a BFD. And thank you Cody for your question because I have been meaning to write about this for a while, and now I can just scoop up this first-draft version and paste it into a blog post – and then, of course, tweet it out. xoxo

Newsweek

Here’s my modest list of a few holes:

• “Men’s share of the labor force has declined from 70 percent in 1945 to less than 50 percent today, and in the country’s biggest cities, young, single, childless women—that is, the next generation—earn 8 percent more than their male peers.” This is a frustrating conflation of stats in two parts. The first part reflects an overwhelming societal change that was triggered by women stepping into the work force during World War II (Rosie the Riveter, anyone?) – not to mention an overwhelming change in the type of work that force did. So, that stat could equally be read as “Women’s share in the labor force has risen from 30 percent in 1945 to over 50 percent today” – and would sound far less ominous.
• Also, don’t conflate a 60+ year trend with a stat that dates from 2008. From the WSJ: “In 2008, single, childless women between ages 22 and 30 were earning more than their male counterparts in most U.S. cities, with incomes that were 8% greater on average.” This compared allwomen to all men, not women in the same jobs. What drives me absolutely crazy about this stat is that the authors failed to note the OVERALL WAGE DISPARITY between women and men. Per the WSJ: “At every education level, from high-school dropouts to Ph.D.s, women continue to earn less than their male peers.” It is GROSSLY irresponsible to omit that.
• “If men are going off the rails, how do they get back on track?” First of all, the one important point, that the recession has ”decimated male-heavy industries,” suggests that there is at least one specific, and presumably short term (economic booms and busts are cyclical) factor here. Second of all, why is the question “Are men in decline?” instead of, “Hey, is this gender parity thing finally catching on?”
• The authors note the trend of “throwback masculinity,” citing Harvey Mansfield’s early-2006 book on Manliness as an example (even though it predated the male-heavy-industry-decimating recession by 2.5 years). They note that “the term “retrosexual” has all but replaced “metrosexual” in the lifestyle sections of national magazines,” even though Google returns only 367,000 results. Then there’s this: “A rapper’s saggy jeans, a hunter’s concealed weapon, a suburbanite’s man cave, a hipster’s obsession with Don Draper: all might be seen as variations of the same coping mechanism. The impulse transcends race and class.” Great, make that assertion. But could you please back it up with some facts? The saggy jean trend is almost two decades old. (I have two words for you: KRISS KROSS). Come on now, do I have to sic Snopes on Newsweek?
• I am, I should note, at the end of the 3rd paragraph.
• “Since the 1950s, the image of the American woman has gone through numerous makeovers. But masculine expectations remain the same—even as there are fewer opportunities to fulfill them.” That’s a good an interesting point. Followed up by: “As a result, says Joan C. Williams, author of Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, ‘men have a choice: either feel inadequate or get a lot more creative.’” Fair. But somewhere could someone note that that’s been the choice for women for ages? (I have two words for you: PEGGY OLSON.)
• Oh, here it is, finally, at the end of the 7th paragraph: “Most guys, in fact, don’t even need rescuing—at least not yet. They’re still overrepresented in business and government, earn more on the dollar, open bigger movies, and clean fewer dishes.” So wait, if “most” men are still “overrepresented” everywhere, how are they “off the rails” and in need of getting “back on track?”
• I don’t mean to go through this line by line, but that said, the next line is: “But the gender wars aren’t a zero-sum game: when men lose, women and children lose, too.” Very very true. But flip it: When women win, men and children win too. (See this Lancet article about the Millennium Development Goals and the domino effects of potential global gender equity.) Also, if you take that to its logical conclusion, then there’s an implied argument against women taking jobs that were “traditionally” men. I’d just like to see a greater appreciation of context, and some examination of how gender parity in pay, status and opportunity is good for society and family. (I know. I’m such a diva!)
• Then there’s a stretch arguing for the Swedish system of parental-as-opposed-to-maternity leave and policies. All good. Except “Sven” is a pan-Nordic name and actually not nearly one of the more popular in Sweden. Okay now I’m just quibbling. Förlåt mig.
• Further down, we see this – as a plus, meant to reassure men that even if they do enter sissy professions like nursing and teaching, they’ll rise above: “While women in traditionally male professions suffer predictable forms of discrimination, men in women’s fields actually enjoy “structural advantages” that “tend to enhance their careers”—a kind of glass conveyor belt that carries them into the “more masculine” areas they perceive to be a better fit for their talents, according to a seminal 1992 study. They become gym teachers instead of English teachers; reference librarians instead of children’s librarians; ER nurses instead of pediatric nurses.” Okay (a) Men have it rough whyagain?; and (b) 1992 was the same year that Kriss Kross came out wearing baggy pants. Please update.
• “Today women still serve as teachers, nurses, and social workers. But they’re also CEOs, soldiers, and secretaries of state. The time has come for a similar expansion of what men can do for a living.” Haaaa, yay Hillary, she’s helping them finally crack that oppressive, terrible barrier! Sorry. Now I’m just being petty. I can totally see “IRON MY SHIRT!” being reclaimed non-ironically an uplifting slogan of a new era.
• Seriously, WHY IS THIS AT THE VERY BOTTOM OF THE ARTICLE? “[I]f the country achieved gender parity in the workplace—an optimal balance of fully employed men and women—the gross domestic product would grow by as much as 9 percent, according to a recent study by the World Economic Forum.” Honestly, that’s bordering on irresponsible. Return to that first, warning paragraph about how men have declined in the workforce and young women are earning more than their male peers. THAT is where this statistic belongs, right up top alongside them. Not at the very very afterthought-y bottom of the piece.
• Again, nowhere in the article does the term “gay” or “homosexual” appear. This article conceives of men, maleness, and “the New Macho” as an entirely heterosexual thing. That, too, is wildly irresponsible. My New Macho includes Neil Patrick Harris, thankyouverymuch. And then some.

Here’s the thing: I know that Romano and Dokoupil had the best of intentions with this piece, to promote a more holistic version of what it means to be a dude in 2010 and to explode – not promote – the silly stereotypes of yesteryear. But whatever their thesis, I am going to want to see assertions supported by fact and conclusions put forth in context. There was a lot of that missing here. (And honestly, I would give their assigning editors more than a little share of responsibility here, too.) And even though the piece neglected to mention gay men, I saw it all through the piece in the shadow version in my head. The so-called “traditional” version of manliness has not traditionally been kind to gay men, either. (Listen to the last line of this song – satirical, but still – for one example.)

Okay, so maybe that was more than a few holes. But look! A shirtless man holding a baby! Awwwwwww.

I am just surfacing from everything that piled up while I was away and working on a post to address the WSJ/Arrington contretemps, to which there is another slew of responses every day. Good. As I wrote to Arrington on Twitter, I’m grateful for the light he’s thrown on this. The fact that people are talking about this – whatever they are saying! – means that it’s on the radar screen. So, mission as articulated in the WSJ accomplished: “Part of changing the ratio is just changing awareness, so that the next time Techcrunch is planning a Techcrunch Disrupt, they won’t be able to not see the overwhelming maleness of it.” I really did just mean that as a recent example (cough 84 speakers 8 women cough), and not to pick on Arrington per se (there is noperennial grudge, contrary to what he wrote). But either way, the conversation is open, results are happening, and I’m a happy camper.

But.

On a personal note, let me just say that getting that Google alert on Saturday night was not fun (who’s the funnest girl at the New Orleans dance party? The one next to the wall outlet, charging her Blackberry so she can respond to something on Twitter). Sunday morning, I tore myself away from the computer to go to the Lower 9th Ward – why I was there in the first place – but knowing that I was leaving this all unresponded to was frustrating.

Actually, it wasn’t at all unresponded to, I just hadn’t gotten it together to write a post yet. Anyone who’s engaged in advocacy work knows that there’s all sorts of other stuff that goes on. But more to the point, I was also doing other work, on a few fronts but most visibly for the site which I helped to build on an issue to which I was committed. So I don’t love how this quote from Arrington has gotten seized on and amplified:

“There are women like Sklar who complain about how there are too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and start companies.”

When you put it that way, who wouldn’t like to be identified with the dynamic person who makes things happen rather than the sulky pouter who complains on the sidelienes? The thing is, I prefer to call it “advocating for productive, awesome, overdue change” than “complaining,” and I happen to be doing it *and* going out and starting companies. (Or helping build them, because the mythology that leadership is only synonymous with having been a founder is one of the fallacies CTR works against.) But either way, it’s a mistake to (a) assume that writing about gender issues in tech or any industry is not “doing something,” and I direct you to the fine work of Irin Carmon on this point, (b) that there is only one way to “do something” and I direct you to the fine work of Marie Wilson on this point, and (c) that “doing something” is an either/or proposition, wherein you either point out ratios that look completely and ridiculously lopsided or you keep your mouth shut while you’re starting whatever it is you’re starting. Good lord if I couldn’t multitask I don’t know what I’d do. Oh look, it’s adancing dog! The point is, there are many paradigms within which women – people, entrepreneurs, advocates, concerned citizens, whatever – can get shizz done.

Which brings us to the quote above, and the source, Pownce’s Leah Culver in the Daily Beast. She’s right – starting a company is way more fun, and certainly more fun than reading about yourself described as a lazy do-nothing complainer. Fortunately, that’s not what Change The Ratio is about. Leah says “less words, more action” and suggests that “we need to congratulate more women on their accomplishments and praise those who helped them along the way.” Done and done – CTR isaction-oriented, and filled with the lady-love. (And, to be honest, the man-love.) The name was specifically chosen to connote action – in the form of “changing” something – and the focus is on the ratio of visibility, access, incentive and opportunity.

Doth the woman protest too much? Probably, but I like to argue. (“No, YOU hang up!”) The real point is, I had to take issue with the specific portrayal of me as doing nothing but complain, and the broader issue of characterizing the broaching of these not-always-fun conversations as just “complaining” with no concomitant “action.” It may not always be fun, but it’s not passive.

And also, often it’s pretty fun, too.

First of all, the contents of Journolist were intended to be private and off-the-record. While Daily Caller may have a fig leaf on the off-the-record thing if the emails were leaked by a 3rd party (a mighty big IF when you consider that a Daily Caller reporter was on Journolist), that doesn’t make it right.

The Olbermann emails center around his treatment of Carrie Prejean, and of then-Senator Hillary Clinton. Some highlights:

The Nation’s Katha Pollitt began the group’s rant. “He and Michael Musto did this whole long riff about beauty contestant Carrie “opposite marriage” Prejean’s breast implants, stupidity, breast implants, tacky clothes, earrings, breast implants. They went on and on about how she was “part plastic” and pathetic.  You’d think they were celibate vegans who spent their lives zen meditating.  It was just a whole TV humiliation of her, and it made me feel sorry for her, which wasn’t easy,” Pollitt said.

…Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and CNN contributor, said Olbermann’s root problem is his misogyny. “I can’t take him anytime. I think to write off his mysogyny as limited to Musto is just not accurate. That very much defined much of how he talked about Clinton as well as others.”

What pisses me off here is that I have consistently, respectfully, and fairly pointed out that Olbermann’s series of sexually-charged attacks against Prejean were unacceptable, and were undermining his otherwise excellent work. My Mediaite colleague, Rachel Sklar, also called Olbermann out during the 2008 campaign for his comments about Hillary Clinton, comments for which he apologized.

I can’t speak for Rachel, but I know I got nothing but hostility from my fellow liberals, who didn’t see the use in defending Prejean, or in criticizing Olbermann. Better to let him sit there and get smelly, instead of telling him he’d stepped in it. All the while, these same folks were happily outraged about it behind the scenes. This is not strictly a liberal phenomenon, as you don’t see very many conservatives rushing to denounce Andrew Breitbart in public for smearing Shirley Sherrod, do you?

Keith Olbermann, meanwhile, frequently uses Journolisters as guests and contributors on his show, a gravy train that might now end. Aside from Dave Weigel, possibly, Olbermann has shown little desire to be disagreed with.

This week marks the one year anniversary of the launch of Mediaite, and what a year it has been. As Dan Abrams notes, predictions of Mediaite’s doom were greatly exaggerated, and as Mediaite columnist and White House reporter from Day One, I have viewed the site’s successful first year from a unique perch. When Rachel Sklar pitched the site to me, I have to confess I was a little bit skeptical, but it didn’t take long for me to see that she and Dan were on to something.

Among other early worries about the site, Rachel and I wondered, at the beginning, what a media blog needed with a White House reporter. By the same token, in hiring me, Mediaite found itself with one, so they needed to find a use for me.

My previous work covering the White House tended to be much heavier on policy and politics than on the media, so it was a challenge, at first, to adapt my style to the new site. In fact, my first-ever question as Mediaite’s White House reporter didn’t even make it onto the blog. For posterity’s sake, here it is:

Luckily, I adapted to covering the media, and the media obligingly adapted to me. The Summer of Health Care provided lots of fodder that was in my wheelhouse, and gave way to an ever-shrinking news cycle that thrust the media into the center of almost every story. It also didn’t hurt that Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was rarely shy about pushing back against all manner of media outlets (including Mediaite) and memes. There were also ample opportunities to cover the view from behind the scenes, as with the Inside the White House Press Corps interview series.

When I returned to the White House as a Mediaite scribe, I noticed one difference right away. When I was with AOL, I used to always get this reaction: “AOL does news?”

With Mediaite, though, there was instant recognition, despite people’s trouble with the name (Media-lite? Media-ate?). Early on, this was due mainly to the participation of Dan Abrams and Rachel Sklar, and more importantly, to the ingenious Power Grid.

Pretty quickly, though, I began to hear less about the Grid, and more about our site as a whole. We developed a reputation for fair, even-handed reporting and commentary, and the people I spoke to in Washington took notice. After a few months, it became common for someone to walk up to me at the White House and say, “You’re Tommy Christopher, right? From Mediaite?” This was a pleasant shock to me. When I was with Politics Daily, people would recognize me despite my outlet, not because of it.

While some people still have trouble with our name, the people we cover in politics and the media sure don’t anymore.

It’s a poorly-kept secret that I can be a little bit temperamental, and coupled with gun-shyness at my well publicized firing from my last job (I note, with satisfaction, our decent lead over my old employer on the Technorati 100, with no help from a parent network), it’s not always great fun being my editor. At the beginning, I was very suspicious of even the most mundane editorial note, certain that there were hints of my doom in every one. Mediaite allows me a great deal of freedom, but as a writer, I have a tendency to be protective of my words, as though each Road House reference were a brush stroke on the Sistine Chapel.

My temperament required such special handling that Managing Editor Colby Hall and I even have a running joke that I’m Hannibal Lecter, and he’s Agent Starling, and I should be handed nothing but soft paper. There’s also the knee-slapper “You’re fired,” to which I sometimes reply “Too soon!” Over the course of the past year, Colby and I have traded many an earful, and in the process, he’s earned my trust, and hopefully, I’ve earned his.

Personally, this has been an incredible year. Much of my first 6 months with Mediaite are detailed in my 2009 Year in Review, but here are some highlights that, if you had told me about them last June, I would have thought you were nuts:

Getting Blacklisted by the Senate Finance Committee: This was one of the most frustrating, yet proudest, moments of the year for me. I had become such a pain in the ass to them in trying to get to the bottom of the lousy PHRMA deal, they just dropped all pretense and admitted they were just lying to me. Proud, because it meant I was doing my job well, and frustrating because I would much rather have gotten answers to my questions.

The Public Option: To the extent that a public health insurance option ever had a chance, I did everything I  could to get the White House to clarify its equivocal, and eventually fruitless, support for it.

Shooting the Shit With Dan Rather: For some reason, we held a launch party 5 months after our launch, and while there were lots of luminaries there, I was blown away by the time and attention given to me by broadcasting legend Dan Rather. It was just another surreal experience for a guy not 2 years removed from being a cubicle drone.

CPAC 2010: What an intense couple of days that was. Aside from getting to see my good friend Ed Morrissey, I also met Rachel Maddow for the first time, had an infamous run-in with Andrew Breitbart, a surreal confrontation with James O’Keefe pal Christian Hartsock, and got to do karaoke with about 10 Redstaters.

Briefing in the Rose Garden: Sometimes, it’s the simple pleasures. I sure am glad Gibbs isn’t doing that now, though.

Meeting Alan Colmes: For some reason, my job usually ends up putting me together with conservatives, so it was nice to be able to sit down and talk to a guy I agreed with for a change.

Chuck Todd’s Star Wars Impressions: Of all the interviews I did with White House reporters this year, Chuck’s still makes me laugh out loud.

Nancy Pelosi Protest Video: This might be my favorite piece of video this year. Aside from being funny, infuriating, and poignant all at once, I felt it really captured some essential truths about our politics, and how poorly served we can be by a two party monopoly.

Helen Thomas: I couldn’t call Helen’s sudden retirement a “highlight” of this past year, but working with her certainly was. The lightning speed of that story’s arc was perfectly illustrative of the shrinking of the news cycle this past year.

Hollering at Colby Hall in the White House Rose Garden: As I said before, it’s not always great fun being my editor. Never was this more the case than on a hot day last November when, as I waited with the assembled press for the President to make remarks in the Rose Garden, I got into a heated shouting match with Mediaite’s managing editor, Colby Hall. I walked about a hundred feet away from the media, but apparently, not far enough. You know how everyone suddenly gets quiet while you’re yelling something embarrassing? Yeah, that happened just as I was yelling my loudest, and cursiest. I turned, and every eye was on me.

It wouldn’t be the last time Colby would have to talk me down, but it was the first time I considered that, maybe, he was in my corner after all.

Meeting Hillary Clinton: This is a story that I haven’t told in print before, and I won’t tell the whole story now, either. Let’s just say that a series of events occurred that ended with me unexpectedly passing Hillary Clinton on a staircase that I wasn’t supposed to be on. As I approached her, I ran through several greetings in my head, and though I decided on “Hello, Madam Secretary,” what actually came out of my face (along with my best officious nod) was “Hi, Secretary!”

I don’t mortify easily, but I still bury my face in my hands at the thought of it.

Getting in Tony Hayward’s Grill: While Jake Tapper‘s zinger at the end makes this clip awesome, it was the sight of my camera, inches from Hayward’s face in a wire service photo, that really took this thing to 11 for me. At first, I was just pissed off that Hayward had fled without answering any questions, but later, I realized that his silence spoke volumes, as did our lack thereof.

The Kevin Jennings Story: Of all the stories I wrote this year, this is probably my favorite. Debunking the barrage of smears against Kevin Jennings was such a heavy lift, many in the mainstream media didn’t bother to try.

I don’t know what this next year holds, but it’s off to a bang-up start. Meet you back here next July.

Do you have a question, comment or complaint about anything concerning Mediaite? Well if you do, today is a real chance to make your voice heard. We will be holding our Mediaite Office Hours at 3pmET.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta will be calling in from the Gulf Coast, where he is anchoring this week. Next week he’s returning to Haiti with several other CNN correspondents. Gavin will be talking about the D.C. goings on, and Rovell will discuss the big event of the day (or week) – LeBron and the ESPN special tonight. Twitter follows: Gupta, Gavin, Rovell.

Glynnis MacNicol, Steve Krakauer and Rachel Sklar host the live-streamed call-in show, and others in the Mediaite team, like, Colby Hall and our fantastic interns, will appear periodically, as well as special guests.

Our call-in number is (347) 632-8956. Also, we’re using Skype now, so you can video chat in to our username – Mediaite. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Watch us live here on this page at 3pmET, or check it out at www.livestream.com/mediaite.

See you at 3pm – the order will be Gavin, Gupta, Rovell.

Alas, it’s hardly surprising that we were met with a tepid reception. We are, at times, reviewing the reviewers and, well, let’s just say that — shockingly! — some in media don’t appreciate being reviewed. Fortunately for us, despite those early pokes, most leaders in media have come to embrace us. We truly appreciate that so many of you have made Mediaite a regular part of your daily web diet.

Mediaite is now welcoming between 1.3 to 1.5 million unique visitors per month to the site. That already puts us ahead of the name-brand media industry websites, significantly ahead of most of the best-known political blogs, and obviously far above what I could have anticipated when we launched. Even more important, the quality of the news we report has quickly made Mediaite a significant player in the national debate. Mediaite is cited regularly in many of the most prestigious traditional publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Forbes, NPR, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Week, and the National Review, as well as routinely being cited by the outlets leading the digital revolution, including Yahoo! and AOL as well as leading political sites like Huffington Post, Drudge, Hot Air, Raw Story, Salon, and others (“others” includes regularly and proudly getting blasted by media watchdogs Media Matters from the left and Newsbusters from the right).

Our team has also broken many of the major media stories of the past year, ranging from the launch of new websites to the sale of existing ones, from television shows coming and going (including CNN’s Campbell Brown leaving) to mass layoffs at networks. Plus, we have been at the forefront of web video as this medium reaches new levels of popularity. That includes our exclusive series of interviews with members of the White House Press Corps, as well as curating news clips from the most exciting moments on cable news.

Despite our tiny staff, we have more than achieved the goal I set forth in my original note one year ago, when I hoped it would become “a unique property that will quickly become a must-read for anyone interested in media, the business of it and the personalities behind it.”

Mediaite is also now the proud parent of three other thriving sites, Geekosystem.com, Styleite.com (which launched in March) and Sportsgrid.com (launched in May). Geekosystem, which examines the online world through the “geek prism,” is rapidly approaching the one million uniques per month mark after just six months in business. Including sister site Gossipcop.com (which has also vastly exceeded expectations in less than a year) and our syndicated content, our sales team is selling over five million unique visitors per month. After all, what is a content site these days without that ultimate proof of viability: advertisers? Last month alone, Mediaite had, among others, Yahoo, Bing, Mercedes, Vespa, Showtime, Syfy, and Bravo as sponsors. In the months to come we will be announcing a variety of additional revenue generating endeavors, as well as additional sites. Even so, this is is still a work in progress, and we look forward to trying to take it to new heights in year two.

So here is to the Mediaite team. They deserve all the credit for nimbly avoiding “doom,” for somehow making even certain skeptics care about “the business and personalities behind the media,” and for admitting they work for a site that was once compared to a diarrhea remedy — even before it was cool. And of course, a big thank you to all of you who have read us, written for us, and advertised with us.

In the meantime, here is a little video look-back at the year that was. (Special thanks to Kevin Gotkin and Video Jon for their terrific work on the video below!)