A one-stop shop for the 'best' blogs

If a single thought-provoking weblog can find a large audience, might 70 or more linked together start a revolution?

That's what Pajamas Media hopes to find out. Backed by $3.5 million in venture capital, the nascent media company has gathered some of the most highly regarded bloggers on the Internet at one site (osm.org), hoping, as co-founder Roger Simon puts it, "to be the place for breaking Internet opinion."

No one questions that the news and information media landscape is on shifting ground. Newspaper circulation is falling while audiences for Internet weblogs - the online journals called blogs for short - are growing rapidly. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that more than a quarter of Internet users read blogs.

Though many of the tens of millions of blogs have few readers, a tiny percentage - often those that discuss the same news topics covered by the mainstream media - have won large audiences. Bloggers have made a name for themselves either by poking holes in the news coverage found on TV and in newspapers or, on occasion, by breaking news of their own.

That readership and notoriety is making these elite blogs attractive to advertisers. Mr. Simon and his partner, Charles Johnson, who writes the popular conservative blog "Little Green Footballs" (www.littlegreenfootballs. com), believe that forming a group of elite bloggers can be an even better moneymaking proposition as their collective site sees its readership and ad rates soar.

Others aren't so sure. The much ballyhooed venture had an early pratfall shortly after it staged a grand opening press conference Nov. 16 at New York City's Rockefeller Center. Launched with the title "Open Source Media," within days the venture had to give up that name, which was already in use by a program on public radio. The company since has reverted to its earlier working title, Pajamas Media, which slyly plays off a comment from a CBS News executive who dismissed bloggers as people who sit at home in their pajamas, posting whatever pops into their heads on the Internet.

Though Pajamas Media is bringing even more attention - and possibly a new revenue model - to blogging, the reaction from many bloggers has been nothing less than scathing. One site, pjmdeathpool.blogspot.com, is collecting guesses as to how many weeks or months Pajamas Media will last before it folds.

"If you say [something] is going to be great for months, and you announce it with a big gala bash, you're asking people to look at it," says Ann Althouse, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin and a well-known blogger (althouse.blogspot. com). The nature of bloggers "is to mock and pick at things," she says, "that's sort of to be expected." But the Pajamas Media site hasn't helped itself, she says. It's been bland.

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