TIME NAMES ‘POWER LINE’ 2004 BLOG OF THE YEAR

New York – “Power Line” (www.powerlineblog.com) has been named Blog of the Year by TIME magazine, in this week’s Person of the Year issue. George W. Bush was named 2004 Person of the Year.

“Before this year, blogs were a curiosity, a cult phenomenon, a faintly embarrassing hobby on the order of ham radio and stamp collecting. But in 2004 blogs unexpectedly vaulted into the pantheon of major media, alongside TV, radio and, yes, magazines, and it was Power Line, more than any other blog, that got them there,” writes TIME’s Lev Grossman.

Power Line is the brainchild of two Minneapolis based lawyers John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson and Washington, D.C. based lawyer Paul Mirengoff. “My view,” Johnson says, “is that the mainstream media has acted as a means to obscure, as a kind of filter, a lens that makes it impossible to understand what’s going on in reality. We try to provide something that brings people closer to reality,” he tells TIME.

Power Line’s biggest challenge to the Main Stream media came in the form of its September 9th post titled, “The 61st Minute”, which questioned the validity of the now infamous 60 Minutes documents relating to President Bush’s service in the National Guard. “The 61st Minute” came from Power Line’s readers, not its ostensible writers. The Power Liners are quick, even eager, to point this out. “What this story shows, more than anything, is the power of the medium,” Hinderaker says. “The world is full of smart people who have information about every imaginable topic, and until the Internet came along, there wasn’t any practical way to put it together,” he tells TIME. TIME reports that Power Line roughly doubled its readership, to the point where it scored half a million hits on Election Day. “The msm (main stream media) will never look as high and mighty again, nor will blogs ever look as low and lowly," writes Grossman.

Full story on TIME.com.

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