Big-name political bloggers are banding together to try to bring order to the sometimes-chaotic blogosphere.
Pajamas Media has signed up 70 bloggers including Instapundit.com's Glenn Reynolds, CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow and Pamela from Atlas Shrugs. The site, which will officially launch Nov. 16 under a different name, will highlight different blogs each day alongside top news headlines.
"It will be the best of mainstream media and best of blog media, side by side, sometimes fighting, sometimes agreeing," said Roger Simon, a novelist and blogger who co-founded Pajamas Media.
The site aims to be "a whole online news service of bloggers from all over the world," said Simon. With a list of contributors that reads like a who's who of the political blogosphere, Pajamas Media thinks its daily blog picks will be of a higher quality than automated services like Memeorandum or keyword aggregators like Technorati.
"Technorati is a search engine; it's all technology. We are going to highlight blogs that we think are good for quality reasons," said Simon.
The site, which is limited to political bloggers now, is slated to become a blog portal for all kinds of subjects, including a lifestyle section. That would put it in competition with established blog networks like Gawker Media.
Gawker publisher Nick Denton had little to say about the future competition. "Since I don't know too much about it I'd rather reserve making a comment," he said.
But the emerging site isn't without harsh critics, even from the blogging community that it looks to empower.
Ann Althouse was contacted to join Pajamas Media, but declined because of the advertising revenue scheme that is going to make the project tick. Pajamas Media will provide all associated bloggers with advertising, but will also limit the individual bloggers' control over what ads will be displayed.
While this means that bloggers won't have to hustle for ads, it will put a cap on the amount of money someone on the Pajamas Media network can make.
"It did not come anywhere near to being an attractive deal for me for many reasons. The No. 1 reason was the skimpy payment compared to Blogads," said Althouse.
Others are more concerned about whether Pajamas Media will be able to find a unifying theme among the pool of bloggers it intends to employ.
"I'm skeptical that the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. It has to have a theme that its varied contributors coalesce around," said Micah Sifry, a blogger and former editor of The Nation.
Louder criticism surrounds which editors Pajamas Media is choosing, as some think the venture will be partial to blogs that reflect Pajamas' political viewpoint. Richard Silverstein has analyzed some of the bigger names in Pajamas Media to show their conservative tilt in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that their viewpoints are farther to the right than Ariel Sharon's.
Simon, however, stresses that Pajamas Media has no ideological leanings and that the group is trying to grab contributors from all over the political spectrum.
"It's not about right or left, it's a different model," Simon said. "There will be 70 different people with 70 different views."
