Site provides 'Spot-on' political commentary

By Neha Kashyap. Posted: 2005-12-09

Chris Nolan, a San Francisco-based veteran political journalist and the founder of Spot-on.com, began a political blog two years ago as a one-woman project.

"I just get tired of yelling at my TV set about the current state of politics," Nolan said. "So I started screwing around with commentary online."

After learning more about how inexpensive online blogging is in comparison with paper media, Nolan decided a year ago to invite other bloggers to create a political commentary website with a unique perspective.

"I realized that this doesn’t just have to be me," she said. "I looked for people who have something to say and who can express themselves well."

Thus, other writers were invited, and Spot-on.com was born.

The site includes blogs by Nolan; international journalist Deborah Klosky; Christopher Brauchli, a practicing lawyer from Boulder, Colorado; and Josh Trevino, a former speech writer for the Bush administration.

Nolan said she wants to provide alternating viewpoints, as reflected by her choice in writers and their respective topics and opinions.

After California's latest elections, for instance, both Trevino and Nolan wrote about the success of moderation over staunch conservatism. Trevino wrote in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Loss," that the election outcome was "the bitter fruit of the shunning of conservatives," while Nolan's post "Off Base" said the election was "fall-out from the general state of national affairs."

"Josh is a great writer, and I disagree with him violently on a lot of issues, but he brings a new point of view to discussions that have become one-sided," Nolan said. "I wanted Republican party politics and national issues from the insider's point of view."

The different takes on current politics have definitely paid off, and Spot-on is now Nolan’s full-time job. The site received around 90,000 hits in October.

Approximately 40 percent of the readers are women, the highest of any political blog, according to two surveys done by the site. Most readers are Democrats, while 20 percent are Republicans, and 10 to 15 percent consider themselves independent.

Spot-on grew through links from other blogs, Google AdSense and the audiences and connections of each of the writers.

The biggest obstacle to succeeding in online journalism, or "stand-alone journalism," as dubbed by Nolan, is the smaller daily tasks required to keep up a site and make sure readership continues to grow.

"You have to think, 'How do you generate traffic?', 'How do you get your name out there?' Other people want to emphasize not how to get to the reader, but that you get there. But we have writers with unusual perspectives, and there’s strength in that," Nolan said.

Future plans for Spot-on include finding more conservative writers and including international points of view, particularly voices from India or China.

"I don’t want to have a 'the Chinese are coming' mentality," Nolan said. "I want a writer who can explain China to America."

Links to this article: Technorati, Yahoo

Comments:

From Jon Garfunkel on December 13, 2005 at 12:29 AM

It didn't take me long reading Chris over the past year to realize that she was a cut above most online yakkers. I've theorized that blogging, by its very nature, encourages derivative copycat thought. Chris breaks the mold. Maybe that's because she's a seasoned journalist and also doesn't get lulled into blogging's lamer tendencies.

A couple of the highlights from the last year on this theme. She was willing to take on of besainted megaphone holders of the liberal blogosphere.

There was a brighter spot earlier in the spring. One of her fellow contributors to the Personal Democracy Forum got wind that San Francisco had some sort of plan to "regulate blogging" for elections, and promptly called for a letter-writing campaign. Chris responded before the weekend to point out that she was PDF's correspondent in SF, and she immediately delivered some substantive background; later she and subsequently went to city hall and reported on it. That should be unremarkable, but consider how Slashdot and other A-listers fanned the flames without lifting a finger (or a foot) to research the story any.

Unforunately, given the way the herd mentality blogosphere works, these get unnoticed.

I don't write this because I owe Chris any favors; I'm not even if she relishes my recognizing her as a mythbuster. The main reason is that I post a lot here (more than any actual Annenberg student, which continues to surprise me), pooh-bahing a lot of ideas, and I thought I'd clarify for that OJR community that I'm not a total curmudgeon. I just have high standards. And for stand-alone journalism, Chris regularly surpasses them.

This article has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.