Related to my piece today about the Plameologists and their fixation on the CIA leak case, I just saw a brief posting by firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher that sheds some light on that site’s emphasis on the Plame matter. Defending Arianna Huffington against accusations that she places too much emphasis on celebrities, Hamsher writes that the Huffington Post and firedoglake use similar strategies to attract readers:
Do people go to the HuffPo because Geoffrey Stone is there? No, they draw big traffic because John Cusack and Alec Baldwin and Harry Shearer are there. But Arianna uses that to provide a platform for important thinkers like Geoffrey Stone who in turn have the opportunity to have greater influence and a bigger audience than they otherwise would.
We do something a bit similar. Atrios says Plame is like porn and it is. We get our big traffic from it, that’s what people love to read about. We use that big traffic to do our series on racism and war profiteering and labor that otherwise probably wouldn’t get much traffic at all. I don’t care if those posts get 10 comments, we’ll keep doing them and they can (and have) begun to impact the consciousness of the blogosphere. I think that’s the responsible thing to do.