Charles Johnson's Latest Bid for Relevance

Charles Johnson picked up one of my throwaway tweets the other day:

CJ's been making a schizophrenic bid for relevance of late. He attacks so-called wingnuts and slanders his old nemeses Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Meanwhile, he's been trying to regain some of the Dan Rather mojo of yore, which hasn't turned out too well, considering how he stole his Reuters "scoop" from other bloggers. AOSHQ masterfully takes him to task, "Charles Johnson Whines: Why Isn't The Story About Me Anymore?", and "Blog Drama":

As to whether he grabs credit and swipes stories: This is a bit of complicated issue, involving blog courtesy and such. Since the rest of this post is so inside-blogball, I guess there's no harm in going further down this rathole.

Let me talk about "swiping stories." Johnson believes that if he throws in a lame hat-tip at the end of a post, he hasn't "swiped a story," because he's given you attribution.

That's not the case. A lame hat-tip at the end of a post covers one's ass, I suppose, in terms of attribution, but it fails to do what a proper link is supposed to do: Throw some traffic.

Some blogs are deliberately "gateway blogs," throwing out traffic wide and far in general furtherance of good-guy blogger boosterism. is deliberately, and most famously, this kind of blog.

Instapundit looks for excuses to link blogs -- not media stories, though he links them too of course; but his primary goal is to call attention to other blogs and "share the wealth." He has a very good reputation along these lines; the only problem with an Instapundit link is that it doesn't throw as much traffic as you'd think it would, but that's largely because he's linking so many blogs during the day that you're just getting a small slice of his readers.

Crucially, if a blog mentions, say, a Reuters story, Instapundit tends to link the blog which tipped him, rather than the Reuters story itself; anyone interested in that story, then, has to at least go through the blog to get to the story. They'll end up at Reuters, but they go through the tipping blog first.

On the other hand, some blogs are very jealous and ungenerous about throwing links and traffic to "competitors." Some blogs fancy themselves not "gateway blogs" but "destination blogs," and attempt to set themselves up as the only blog you need to read.

Not a portal, then, but a terminus.

It has always been my belief that Charles Johnson fancied his blog as that...

It's all goodness, so more at the link --- and I don't know if I'm throwing Ace much traffic, LOL!