• Moderator, journalist, blogger and former Buzz queen Cathy Seipp
• Matt Welch, veteran blogger and journalist
• Charles Johnson, editor of the fiery anti-terrorist blog LittleGreenFootballs
• Kevin Drum, former author of Calpundit and now blogger of the Washington Monthly's Political Animal
• Roger L. Simon, mystery novelist and screenwriter who took up blogging to promote a book ("I haven't written a novel or a screenplay since!" he jokes upon introduction.)
• Sassy Republican Moxie, who Seipp said "represents the 20% of women bloggers"
• And Slate political pundit Mickey Kaus

Seipp: Start with why you started blogging, and tell us, do you think blogging affects traditional media coverage and politics?

Kaus: I started blogging because there was no other job I wanted to do - I started out at Newsweek - they only have so many stories a week, and the newshole is taken up by what went on earlier in the week - My theory was if worse came to worst, I could always post my stuff up on the web, and worse came to worst. I do know that journalists read blogs... journalists are sensitive to criticism like anybody else, they want to read their reviews.... I do think it has to have an effect. YOu cna't point to an instance other than that of Howell Raines' demise, to show that bloggers have influence. America's number one newspaper is now run by a guy who's 100% more reasonable than Howell Raines.

Seippp: So you're probably the first person here to start blogging

Moxie: I think so, I started blogging in Oct. of 2000

Kaus; I don't know - I was June, '99. (Low mutter from the audience: "Whoooaaaa...")

Moxie: I did not start my blog with the intention of writing about politics, but over the ourse of time, I became enraged by what I saw reporte din the newspaper. A large part of the population believes that there are no right-wing women here - except for Cathy - and the whole stereotype of a Republican being a fat, bald man who resembles Rush Limbaugh. So I made the transition over to writing about politics, and it's been great.

Simon: (re: Moxie's comment about blogs) It's an extraordinary way of making contact with people and meeting people. I've been working in H'wood for 30 years and living a very insular life - but once you start blogging, you meet people from all over the world. You meet people instantly, almost anywhere and you have a fair idea that they're pretty bright. It's a new form of communication that extends beyond a limited realm, especially in LA where we all live only within the range of our car, and that's very alienating. I got into blogging as a form of promotion because I'd been reading a lot of people on this panel, plus Glenn Reynolds - and I had a novel coming out.

Drum: I spent the past 20 years of my life as a software exec (He later left the industry) Spent some time reading on the web, I clicked over to Glenn Reynolds one day, and I saw this thing - there were all these things written by this same guy - I couldn't figure it out - I watched it for a few days, and got a copy of Blogger, signed up, and set it up and started writing. (Washington Monthly approached him to do long-form writing, he decided against it because he'd spent much of his marketing career doing that - he liked blogging just fine) - started August 2002.

Johnson: I started blogging in Feb. 2001 to teach myself about the technologies that are used for this - I'm a software designer and designer as well as musician - I wound up writing my blog software myself. But when LittleGreenFootballs started, it was pretty much oriented towards Web design - you'll see back in the old posts items about cute web programs, and the Viking Kittens - but on Sept. 11 I saw so many threats I'd been aware of over the years come together on that morning, and it started a process that led to where LittleGreenFootballs is now. I think when I first started blogging after 9/ll, my main focus was on like most people are asking - "Why do they hate us? How can they live among us and ... still go through with this plan of Sept. 11?" And if you go back to Sept. 11, you'll see me going through every source. I was aware of all the threads of Islamic extremism, I was even aware of Osama bin Laden's first declaration of war on us which happened in l996. I had no doubt instantly, as soon as I saw the planes smashing into the towers, and it's been a very interesting process. ... the mainsteam media still whitewashes this enormously. I think the media is not telling us what we need to know about the war that we're in - in fact, we're not even told that this is a war. We're told, "go on about your business." I want to write about this information that will lead to more enlightenment.

Welch: What Charles does that's very interesting. He goes through the Arab press and he finds transripts from sermons and things given in mosques, and he picks throgh these things and presents them. It's a classical example of somebody hwo has an editorial filter that he's going to give to people. I'm a lot less interesting (general laughter) I always though that blogs were stupid and narcissistic - and I still do - I after Sept. 11 I wanted to be able to sort of react to news and events and just crazy stories of fifth and sixth planes and whatever, in real time. So I started a weblog - I understand technology aout as well as I can tie my own shoe - it was a way to process and flag stories and things that were sort of pissing me off. About 1,500 people found that interesting, and to this day, that's about how many people find it that interesting. Ultimately, I don't care about politics too much, I'm interested in media and music and international affairs to some extent. People who are interested in politics like Mickey are kind of crazy and untrustworthy - I write about baseball statistics and what my friend did the other day at a bar. (He's kidding, of course)

Seipp: All right, Matt, you've had a few drinks (general laughter) that's a lot of bullshit - you've got a political blog. All the people who warn't professional writers who are just very good writers that you never would have noticed before. You meet a lot of people just in cyberspace that you would not ordinarily meet - It makes the world a lot smaller.

Welch: One of my very first readers was a Republican cop from Pomona - he became a great correspondent, and it takes the teeth out of trying to dehumanize people from different points on the political spectrum. ... You meet these people, and you want to bounce an idea off them. There's nothing like it journalistically. I'm a journalist, but I use the weblog almost every day to try to bounce an idea off someone who comes from a compeltely different viewpoint.

Johnson: Little Green Footballs has one of the more active comment communities (general laughter). We get rapped a lot, too. We get audiences of up to 100,000 visitors a day. It's the size of a small town. You're gonna have, as with any small town, the doctors, the lawyers, the police officers, and your'e also going to have your village idiots, some of whom are overly zealous in the epxression of their agreement. (You get different points of view, exchange of ideas that allow you to make arguments) The ability of people to follow it through, even when it gets heated.

Drum: One of the things I like about blogging and reading other people's blogs is the exchange of views. ... I like the conversation as much as I like writing, and I like writing a lot.

Simon: I don't have anything more to say about this.

Moxie: In three ways my world has been expanded - the first is I felt very alone living in Los Angeles, I grew up in NYC, and being a Republican, I felt I was the only one. Once I got on the web and started to write the things that were important me, i saw that I wasn't alone, there were people here in L.A. who had similar beliefs, and there were people across the country who did. The second way is in terms of professional writing (she's written for a newspaper and a national mag) and the third way is I'm getting freelance photography jobs.

Kaus: Unlike Matt, I have not found that the web has broken down class barriers. You have to visit each other's sites in order to attack each other - I think the web is a force against Balkanization. I have heard from people all over who I've come to rely on for tips, who are very smart. I just have not found myself talking to cops in Pomona. They've been lawyers who have a lot of time on their hands and have easy access to computers and are frustrated with their jobs, or women who don't have careers and have access to computers.

Welch: There's an important distinction - Mickey doesn't have comments, my site does ...

Kaus: ... There are a lot of great music bands who do great things

Welch: (such as?)

Kaus - (Obliging with the plug for Welch's band) all right, Ken Layne and the Corvids - that doesn't happen with blogs- if you do good work, you will be read. And if you do wrong, you will go down the next day. It is a true meritocracy.

Seipp: One of the reasons it tilts right, it is the ultimate free-market opportunity. Anyone can start up a blog. On the other hand, some blogs don't get hits, others do.

Q: Trolls and the feeding of - those who have comment sections, you have your trolls ... what works best, just hoping they'l go away, letting the others chew on them?

Johnson: Nothing. There's no way to shut them down entirely.

Welch: I'm too small to attract trolls - but usually I have a thing saying please use your real name - and when someone's acting like an asshole, I will sit there and argue with them until they leave.

Seipp: I think it's amazing how few comments are really nasty and abusive - people could put anything, and they don't. I've seen horrible things written about me on like Front Page, but not on my own site.

Johnson: Personal attacks - as someone who is personally attacked almost every day, I am personally attacked every day.

Seipp : You're called an odious Neanderthal!

Simon: That's not personal!

Seipp: There seems to be a general code of honor, that people generally don't sign on to attack you..

Q: How did you come up with name of Little Green Footballs?

Johnson: I've had a music business in that name, (He hedges repeatedly) ... It has to do with a hang-gliding incident in Tokyo.

Q: I'm a talk show junkie, something happens when someone goes big, national. You guys, some of you are geting huge - do you see a change in the way you are, your attitude as opposed the way you started out?

Johnson: Yeah, I see a change from when I started out - remember, I started before Sept. 11. As far as my personal feelings about myself - I didn't start this blog to become popular, it's kind of a surprise it's become as popular s it has, and hopefully I can keep that attitude, beausse that's wtah makes it work.

Drum: When I started up with the Washington Monthly, I got emails from people, half of them said I'd gotten more shril and liberal, the other half said I'd sold out to the man.

Kaus: A lot of people who are a lot bigger than I am , like Josh marshall, He started a year after me, and sort of zoomed past me. ... Tehre is a problem with working for a corporation, and workgin for Microsoft, nobody edits me, it's a congenial atmosphere, but there is the threat of libel suits, and if I libel someboyd and Msoft is responsible, some people will be more liable to sue Microsoft.

Q: How long do you spend blogging?

Seipp: That's hard to say, isn't it.

Welch - Mickey, you're one of the only ones up here who's a paid blogger, and yet you'll go for a couple of days without posting.

Kaus (he cops to it, and then says) I am burning out.

Q: I'm a legitimate journalist, I write for a magazine that gets 60,000 readers, but my blog gets zero - how do you guys get so many hits?

(Simon and Johnson, plead ignorance)

Welch - Links - people check their trackback links obsessively, and want to see how many hits they got, so they hit you.

Kaus: The other thing is writing peopel emails - you read an email, the link is right there, and if you like it, you link it.

Moxie: There are people who write content, and people like Instapundit who will write links to all these other people.

Welch: there are 2.5 million people with blogs, 2.5 million weird people with blogs - I don't think you can make generalizations about them.

(Seipp brushes off Luke Ford's question - have any of you gottten laid from blogging?)

(Boi from Troy asks how people deal with spam comments, and posts from flacks.)

Johnson: As you get a sense from people who comment often, you get a sense of when someone's trying to game you.

Moxie: I've had people write me asking me to write about their client or their car.

Q: Do you worry about the race to the bottom, with Nick Denton, and what happened to Ala Pundit? (Ed: Am I even spelling this right?)

Simon: I correspond with him - he's trying to get work. I think that's one way to look at it. He's a young guy, he's extremely bright - I'll be really blunt- I think this is a guy in a different society who'd be an immense success. The side of the fence he's on, they won't give him a job.

Q: How much do you see rage against the media having an effect?

Johnson: The Muslim Public Affairs Council came out with statement condemning terrorism and asking people to inform on people taking part in this kind of thing. But in stories about this initiative by MPAC, they all quote one of the MPAC officials, who is named Maher Hatu (sp?), who's the senior director. Basically, the guy has been - before Sept. 11, a whole series of statements that are so extreme they're almost unbelievable. Not one press story brings up the guys' past, they all represent him as a moderate Muslim leader - to me that's very very irresponsible. It may be partially simple incompetence. but I think it's also an indication of a certain endemic slant in the media to downplay the threat of Islamic terrorism- this is a lot of what drives me.

Q: anyone up there want to do to (L.A. Times editor John) Carroll what Mickey did to Howell Raines (referring to an earlier thrashing Kaus gave to the much-despis-ed former NY Times editor)?

Seipp: He's a decent man and I think it's a decent paper, I just think it could be a little more interesting.

Welch - He is as an editor saying, this is what I think, and he's saying it to the public, and that should be commended.

Kaus - I am burning out, but I don't think I'll ever give it up because of the power...

Moxie - When it ceases to be fun, forget it.

Q: Does anybody think the word "blog" denigrates what you do, as opposed "journalist"?:

Drum: I love the word. I think it sets apart what you do. I'm not a writer, I am not a columnist. It's what I do.

Moxie: I hate it. I think it's incredibly demeaning, and I think we're writers, and the medium is a blog, and it's mostly software at this point.

L to R: Cathy Seipp, Rob Long, Allan Mayer, Mike Sullivan, Andrew Breitbart (click to ENLARGE)

• Rob Long - a longtime TV producer, who ran Cheers at 26, veteran of the upfronts, columnist for the National Review, soon to be a commentator on KCRW beginning this month.
• Allan Mayer - founder of the late, great Buzz Magazine, senior partner at Citric and Company (which aids celebs in trouble and helps them wrangle the press)
• Mike Sullivan - producer in H'wood, president of programming for UPN, board of dirs for Polis Productions (sp?) , former ABC network censor
• Andrew Breitbart, coauthor of Hwood Interrupted. Insanity Chic in Babylon - the Case Against Celebrity and - oh, coincidentally, he mentions an hour into it that he helps run the Drudge Report ("I'm Matt Drudge's bit ch," he jokes)

Breitbart: The abuses at Abu Ghraib prison went public in January, but no one cared much about it until we saw the pictures - we just send stuff up there without thinking about it - (our cultural exports via satellite transmissions) and we send offensive unelected emissaries - people that are to me innately offensive, like Michael Moore, and send people the worst possible word about who we are as Americans ... Celebrities are unelected ambassadors of bad will abroad.

Sullivan - There is this enormous change from Lucy and Ricky to Janet Jackson - society has broken down, people used to watch television together, and there are changes in cultural norms. Reality TV is about running the other guy off the road... Breakthrough shows were all from independent companies. (Carson, Lucy, et al) - you can't do that any more. Cost is just too high.

Seipp - You want to comment on the sad state of how our local media covers Hollywood?

Mayer: There is a cluelessness not just about how Hollywood works, but about how most things work. We expect more out of the news media, we look for some institution to rescue us, and journalism - for the generation of (the baby boomers) the heroes were journalists. years ago when I was writing for Newsweek, and the Janet Cooke scandal broke. Newsweek had an awkward role in reporting that - I wound up writing this long essay about what was wrong with journalism - one of the things I said is the worst thing that ever happened to Journalism is Watergate because it turned journalists into moral heroes. There's a cluelessness that pervades a lot of journalism - laziness, loss of ethics.

The sad thing is that obviously the different depts at the L.A. Times don't speak to each other, which is a way of saying there's no institutional memory at the L.A. Times. What worries me more about entertainment culture - "One of the characteristics of the totalitarian style is to turn arguments of fact into arguments of motive." Not invented by bloggers - So much of what public discourse is about now isn't what's happened, which is hard enough to figure out, but why is he saying that, why is he doing it - we're trying to figure out people's motives. .. To me, that's the corruption that's killing public discourse.

Seipp - [Why is Hollywood to the left?]

Long: 50 years ago, Lucy and Ricky was not considered an interracial marriage, and now it would be. (Laughter from audience) I suspect it's just cooler. Why are kids in college to the left? I don't know. It's all about motivation. It's easier to identify yourself with a political philosophy that wants things to better rather than this kind of saturnine view of the world - that people are just awful and that's why we shouldn't give any power to them. (Older H'wood writers always bring up the blacklist) WGA's this massive cauldron of bitterness. What people around the world see, they don't even understand English, they like to look at movies - Half of the world hates us because it's all about gay marriage and phone sex and bikinis on the beach, the other half hates us because we're all uptight and prudish - we must be doing something right. Journalists are so goddamned pompous - they're almost as bad as ACTORS.

Seipp - what's one of the worst examples? Can you think of any?:

Long: No. Variety gets it wrong all the time - a hit and a flop sometimes change within a week of reporting.

Sullivan - the definition of what a hit is (changes).

Ratings - HBO puts out ratings, it's all within their subscribers, not the public at large.

Long - Mike Sullivan canceled me once. (general laughter)

Breitbart: Blogging is built on the critique of mainstream journalism. No body's talking about runaway production on a large scale - nobody's obsessed with Hollywood the way that Hollywood's obsessed with Hollywood. I'm just shocked to this day that there aren't people filling in that void. There's a journalistic vacuum. I would love it if there were a tabloid that covered Hollywood.

It would be so fun to have JennniferAnistonisEvil.blogspot.com! I'd love for these Jayson Blair moments happen in Hollywood, where people have to go up to Randy Weaver's old place in Idaho and hide out!