What are some disadvantages to insider blogs?
Most of these insider political sites approach the election without explicit partisanship... [but] that popularity comes with disadvantages.
- For one, these sites are all devoted exclusively to the horse race; look elsewhere if you want to know what the candidates might do about the trade imbalance with China.
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Second, they tend to do to political conversation what chain restaurants do for food, making everyone, everywhere talk about things the same way...
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Finally, the sites make it easy to lose perspective... it might be difficult to resist joining the herd and its conventional wisdom. Indeed, some Web authors say they shut down their computers to give themselves a chance to think.
The aforementioned sites generally see their mission as covering how the political and media elites are chronicling the election. But an entirely new crop of sites have sprung up to deal with the other extreme -- how the campaign is playing out in the wild Web frontiers of YouTube, MySpace and the like... [such as] techpresident.comư