This chart visually illustrates the number of mentions from blogs to columnists in the previously-defined “punditsphere” in each of the last four years up until September 17, 2007 (see the source data). Each year is illustrated by a different color:
9/18/2003 – 9/17/2004 | 9/18/2004 – 9/17/2005 | 9/18/2005 – 9/17/2006 | 9/18/2006 – 9/17/2007 |
Hovering over a segment will show the number of references tallied. The numbers generated below are from a Google search based on 5 results per page, and starting from the 30th result; this I found supplied fairly consistent numbers (for some combinations, Google Blog Search would inexplicably return no results). Clicking on each segment will bring up the Google results in a separate window. The numbers will likely not match, but are more or less close (I have yet to do the math on how much Google’s result counts variesclick to click).
The writers are ordered by the number of posts in the last year. This helps illustrate the movement in the last year relative to the previous three.
Columnist/Blogger |
|
|||||||||
1 | Michelle Malkin | |||||||||
2 | Andrew Sullivan | |||||||||
3 | Christopher Hitchens | |||||||||
4 | Thomas Friedman | |||||||||
5 | Paul Krugman | |||||||||
6 | Hugh Hewitt | |||||||||
7 | David Brooks | |||||||||
8 | Glenn Greenwald | |||||||||
9 | George Will | |||||||||
10 | Frank Rich | |||||||||
11 | William Kristol | |||||||||
12 | Mark Steyn | |||||||||
13 | Pat Buchanan | |||||||||
14 | Maureen Dowd | |||||||||
15 | Jonah Goldberg | |||||||||
16 | Josh Marshall | |||||||||
17 | Robert Novak | |||||||||
18 | Arianna Huffington | |||||||||
19 | Kevin Drum | |||||||||
20 | Michael Barone | |||||||||
21 | Charles Krauthammer | |||||||||
22 | Mickey Kaus | |||||||||
23 | David Broder | |||||||||
24 | Joe Klein | |||||||||
25 | Peggy Noonan | |||||||||
26 | Bob Herbert | |||||||||
27 | Richard Cohen | |||||||||
28 | David Corn | |||||||||
29 | Dan Froomkin | |||||||||
30 | E.J. Dionne | |||||||||
31 | Rich Lowry | |||||||||
32 | Nicholas Kristof | |||||||||
33 | Eugene Robinson | |||||||||
34 | David Ignatius | |||||||||
35 | Fred Barnes | |||||||||
36 | Fareed Zakaria | |||||||||
37 | Charlie Cook | |||||||||
38 | Michael Kinsley | |||||||||
39 | Jeff Jacoby | |||||||||
40 | Jonathan Chait | |||||||||
41 | Ellen Goodman | |||||||||
42 | Jonathan Alter | |||||||||
43 | Anne Applebaum | |||||||||
44 | Tony Blankley | |||||||||
45 | Stanley Fish | |||||||||
46 | Clarence Page | |||||||||
47 | Roger Cohen | |||||||||
48 | Paul Gigot | |||||||||
49 | Judith Warner | |||||||||
50 | Chris Suellentrop |
Overall, the general trend seems to square with our expectations. There is a Top 7 group who have been referenced greather than 35,000 times over all. Three are the Times top stars. Three are bloggers. The other is the beyond-category: Christopher Hitchens.
The presence of Hitchens in the top 7 without benefit of a Times-like institution or a blog followship to buoy him gives a hint to his raw influence. Hitchens is the Kevin Bacon (or Lois Weisberg or Burgess Meredith) of punditry, who by virtue of his rhetorical agility is probably adored (and despised) by more diverse circles than anybody. He also brings more conviction to his writing than any on the list or off. In the newest issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens wrote a touching elegy for Mark Daily, a young man from California who graduated U.C.L.A. and then joined the Army and marched off to Iraq, only to die when an I.E.D. blew up his Humvee; Hitchens was drawn to Daily’s tragic story after reading that his own writings had “deeply inspired” Daily to serve. Whether the same has been said of #11 on the list, William Kristol, or #1, Michelle Malkin, I do not know.
On casual glance, the graph appears to illustrates a “long tail” that has long been assumed in weblog metrics. But in this case, the salient feature of the tail is that it is thick; it does not drop off enough (The title of a March 2007 Forrester research report by Jaap Favier has suggested a similar shyft of terminology). We’ll examine this next.
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