*Making it in the Political Blogosphere*

The author is Tanni Haas and the subtitle is The World’s Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success.  There are interviews with Arianna Huffington, Jane Hamsher, Nick Gillespie, Lew Rockwell, Juan Cole, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, yours truly, and others.  Here is a comment from Kevin Drum:

When I started out, there was much more of a tendency to engage with the other side.  Liberals and conservatives would attack each other, but we’d also engage with each other in at least a moderately serious way.  Today, you get almost none of that.  There’s very little engagement between left and right.  And what engagement there is tends to be pure attack.  There’s no real conversation at all.  That’s a difference that I think professionalization has brought about.  The political blogosphere has become more tribal.

A good point, but I blame professionalization less than Kevin does.  Maybe some of us are simply a bit sick of each other, and the accumulated slights and misunderstandings weigh more heavily on our emotional responses than does the feeling of generosity from working together in the same “office.”  I predict that a given experienced blogger is likely to feel more sympathy for new bloggers, but on average I doubt if the new bloggers are better or more tolerant.

Which means we mostly have ourselves to blame.

Addendum: Nick Gillespie comments.