Some of you may have noticed I’ve linked a site called Not Tucker Carlson a few times the last couple of days. There’s a bit of a story there you might find interesting.
Last week, Tucker Carlson, he of the eponymous bow tie, announced during a blogger luncheon at the Heritage Foundation, that he was going to launch a new site to take on the Huffington Post. The site, called TheDailyCaller.com, won’t launch for three weeks and won’t actually be publicly visible for some time after that.
When it finally launches, The Daily Caller will be — wait for it — “a general-interest newspaper-format style site” that will “[add] facts to the conservation”.
Can’t you just feel the excitement already? Tucker Carlson running a news aggregator web site? Wowzers, folks, I think I just had one of Chris Matthews’ leg-thrills!
A day or so later, I got a phone call from Stacy McCain asking me if I wanted to be the Deputy Editor of a new blog. Since, apparently, I’m a glutton for punishment and am becoming one of the biggest sellouts the blogosphere has ever seen, I said “Yeah, sure. Why not?”.
It wasn’t until I hung up that I realized I had no idea what the heck Stacy was talking about. Luckily, he filled me in the next day. He was going to start his own web site to aggregate the news, his way. Well, actually, our way. He also roped in smitty, his Frequent Commentor and Blogospheric Man Friday we officially launched the site this morning.
The site is called Not Tucker Carlson because, well, it’s exactly the opposite of what Tucker Carlson is trying to do. He has name recognition, a big “coming out” announcement, and more than likely enough funding to hire a few writers to do the work for him. We have ten bucks (which we used to register a domain name), Stacy’s finely-honed reporting chops, smitty’s technical know-how, and my…whatever I have.
We also have one big advantage over Tucker. We have much more room to succeed than we do to fail.
Tucker made a big mistake in calling out the HuffPo before his site was anywhere close to being live. Three weeks is an eternity in the blogosphere and, by the time his site finally does make it to the masses, all the buzz will be gone. You can get a lot of traffic from some early hype (indeed, that’s one reason HuffPo started with as much traffic as it did), but you can’t let too much time pass between the hype and the site launch. “Strike while the story is hot” is just basic blogger know how and Carlson’s announcement shows me that he doesn’t undestand blogging even a little bit. But that’s only a minor mistake. It can be overcome.
What may end up dooming the TuckPo (as it will end up being called) is that he started talking smack before he tasted the first little bit of success. While a certain amount of swagger is absolutely necessary to be a successful blogger, you have to always remember one of the main rules of the playground: don’t talk smack before you’ve played your first game. Smack-talking isn’t something you can just do. You have to earn the cred to make the bragging stick. Tucker Carlson has no online cred. He barely has pundit cred after being shown up by a comedian on his own show. Unfortunately, Carlson has set himself up a situation where any success he has will be expected, given the hype, and any failure will be enormous. It’s now impossible for him to fail small.
I’ll say that it is possible for Carlson to have a wildly successful site. There are plenty of bloggers out there with experience and online savvy who he could hire for much less than he thinks. He could have a site online by the end of the week, with a custom layout, experienced bloggers, and someone to wrangle the content if he really wanted to and it wouldn’t cost him nearly as much as he’s no doubt planning to spend on his site right now. I don’t imagine he’ll do that because he has too much invested in doing it his way already, but you never know.
In the meantime, the longer he waits, the longer folks like Stacy, smitty, and I will be out there showing him up. As you can see already when you visit the site, we’re all over the top news stories. We’re only going to get better.
So, as Stacy said this morning in the rollout announcement, it’s time to rock and roll.
Tags: Blogs and Blogging, Huffington Post, Not Tucker Carlson
I blogrolled it right away. And I love it – the more the merrier! And since you’re the Deputy Chief Kahuna, can I campaign for some future linky love?
I always liked Tucker. Don’t really agree with him much these days, but he can be honest at least. But his problem is that conservatives don’t like him, despite the fact he’s pretty much a Reagan/Libertarian style conservative. But it’s that Libertarian thing that conservatives don’t like. The idea that anyone but corporations and government should have rights is just too hard to take for modern conservatives. Tucker’s the kind of old school conservative I used to be. I’d check out his site. I used to watch his show regularly.
Plus, I love the bow tie. I rarely wear more than boxer shorts because I work at home. But when I wear a suit, I like the bow tie. My ties are about equal between the two. Unless I do the ascot, of course, but that’s only to really freak people out. Nobody does the ascot these days, or in the last century. We’ll except for a few people in the Sixties.
“But it’s that Libertarian thing that conservatives don’t like.”
That’s not right, is it. If Obama wanted the kind of taxes Reagan wanted, what would be the term? If Obama is a Socialist, then Reagan would be a Communist. Reagan was far more liberal than Obama is now. Yet somehow, conservatives worship the Communist Reagan, and denigrate the Socialist Obama. Granted, Obama has taken over 0.2% of the economy because the banks insisted that he do so. I’m with you on the concept that Obama should never listen to the banks. But how is doing the bank’s bidding Socialist? Obama didn’t want this, the banks that fund these insolvent corporations wanted it. Granted, it is Socialism, but it’s only Socialism for the wealthy. It’s not like anyone is helping anyone who is actually in need. We’re only helping the people who Republicans want to help. And that’s really the problem. Helping poor people would pay off much more, but the Republicans won’t let that happen. They believe that the purpose of government is to secure the position of those that are already secure.