“Taking the Boeing”, the phenomenon of bloggers taking jobs with various conventional media outlets, has become a commonplace. Matt Yglesias went first to The Atlantic, then the Center for American Progress. Andrew Sullivan, once an editor at TNR, became a blogger, now blogs for The Atlantic. Megan McArdle now blogs for The Atlantic. Kevin Drum now blogs for Mother Jones, Ezra Klein for The Washington Post. And so on.
Quietly and without fanfare Joe Gandelman, an old newspaperman and proprietor of The Moderate Voice, one of the first blogs on my rather select blogroll and someone I consider a blogfriend, has taken a different direction in the integration of blogs and newspapers. I think it began with his recruiting old newspapermen to post on his blog: Robert Stein, Shaun Mullen, others.
Then there were political cartoons. Apparently, Joe has some sort of licensing agreement with Cagle Cartoons and he posts political cartoons regularly from that source.
Now he’s taken the next step: he’s licensing content from The Washington Post. On his front page right now he has columns from Ruth Marcus, Eugene Robinson, and E. J. Dionne.
It will be interesting to see how Joe develops this idea and whether it spreads.
HuffPo and TPM have been running AP and similar content for some time. It’s an interesting idea.