Every movement or media phenomenon starts with amateurs improvising. But at some point it has to be professionalized if it’s going to be sustained and grow. The new progressive movement started with guys like Atrios, who then got picked up by Media Matters. Dozens of lefty bloggers are employed by the new lefty infrastructure. As far as I know, Erick Erickson at Red State, and possibly my Townhall co-bloggers MKH and Matt Lewis, are the only ones employed full time by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Blog Division, who aren’t primarily journalists and as such have real freedom of action.Without a doubt, one of the reasons the "netroots" has been more effective is that they have many more full-time bloggers. It's hard to do a full-time job, and then have time to do any significant blogging.
... Sure, you can have a job and still find time to write musings, but it's hard for a conservative blogger to hold down a full-time job and still have time to develop sources, sit in on campaign conference calls, and attend all the conferences that are constantly going on. Yet these are all vitally important if you want to occasionally break news or, at least, contribute to the debate ...