Ana Marie Cox

Ana Marie Cox, former Washington Editor of Radar, conducted a long interview with CBS News political analyst-turned-McCain-Palin campaign advisor Nicolle Wallace for Tina Brown and Barry Diller's Web site, The Daily Beast. (The Observer's Felix Gillette spoke with Ms. Wallace earlier this month.)

Early on, Ms. Wallace jokes that she walks her dog, Lily, "in Central Park with a group of wonderful, flaming liberals who I love and I love their dogs," but soon enough, Ms. Cox gets down to some serious questioning:

What are the media lessons people can learn from this election?

I think the networks have re-emerged as the arbiters of what story gets through.  read more »

Also in the October/November issue of Radar, Ana Marie Cox interviews John McCain about his favorite TV shows. (Good two months for them!) Mr. McCain, who David Letterman excoriated last night for bailing on his show, said that he really likes the late night talk show host in the article which is currently not online.

As Mr. McCain told Ms. Cox:

One reason I like to go on those shows, particularly ones like Leno or Letterman, is that they help you reach a wide viewing audience that otherwise would not be paying attention to the political scene—people who would never be exposed to the Sunday-morning shows or other programs that politicians are traditionally on.  read more »

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal's Amy Schatz reported that Google would be setting up a "two-story, 8,000 square-foot headquarters for hundreds of bloggers descending on the Democratic convention in Denver next week, and it will offer similar services at the Republican convention in September, as new media gain influence in politics."

According to Ms. Schatz, for $100, Google will provide access to the workspace along with "food and beverages, Google-sponsored massages, smoothies and a candy buffet."

If it's half as comfortable as it sounds, it will be a vast improvement over bloggers' digs during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.  read more »

Is Laura Ingraham brushing up on her Baudrillard?

According to Time Magazine's Swampland blogger Ana Marie Cox, radio host (and Fox News fill-in presenter) Laura Ingraham can't tell the difference between reality and Hollywood special effects.

Ms. Cox recounts the story of Zoriah Miller, a photographer who lost his embed assignment for posting pictures of Marines killed in Iraq on his Web site. (Note: Link goes to the main page, not the pictures in question.) Mr. Miller appeared on Ms. Ingraham's show where the host actually questioned the need for any photos from Iraq since, "We've seen enough of the horror, with the high-tech Hollywood, okay. We know what it is."

Quite apart from the Transformers and Mummies at the multiplex, Ms. Ingraham is no stranger to high-tech horrors. So maybe she is also already keenly aware of the devastating results of this war?

I’m at a Personal Democracy Forum conference about technology and politics right now at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where Ben, Ana Marie Cox and a few other folks were discussing the impact technology had on journalism and politics this year.

Ben got a hearty-ish laugh from the audience with a counter-intuitive analysis of this year’s history-making Democratic nomination fight, which he repeated to me afterwards: "What’s older than a young candidate sweeping away the older, establishment candidate?"

He said it was an old line, but whatever -- it was new to me.

“Three or four people leaving is not a big deal,” insisted Maer Roshan, founder and editor in chief of Radar.

Actually, it’s five: Senior editor Tyler Gray, en route to Blender, just had his last day at the magazine, as did managing editor Leigh Ann Boutwell, who is joining her boyfriend on the West Coast. On the business side, the magazine’s president, Fred Poust, fled Radar’s East 45th Street offices on May 30, along with finance director Dwight Holovach and Web site general manager Michael Small, who came in with great fanfare from Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone.  read more »

Who will ensure Twitter tweets uninterrupted? That's the question posed by Silicon Alley Insider's Hank Williams about the popular wireless and web-based application that allows users to share their brain farts on the web in real time. Everyone from Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody ("I'm smoking Virginia Slims today. I've come a long way, baby," 06:43 PM May 03, 2008 from txt) to Slate's political correspondent John Dickerson ("At Dairy Queen with Clinton. She had Blizzard with Snickers I had" [sic.], about 17 hours ago from txt) has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon (bandtwagon?), but what if their tweets wind up in the dustbin of histowy?  read more »

Yesterday, Gawker reported on what it called a “catfight” between Nation columnist Eric Alterman and Time.com’s Washington editor, Ana Marie Cox, setting the scene at television host John McLaughlin’s brunch the day after the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

As is his wont, Mr. Alterman fired back via the Huffington Post calling out Gawker on not having had anyone there to see the argument between the two.

He mentioned that we were recording, which is a little embarrassing. But since the cat’s out of the bag, we thought that for that margin of the population that has a stake in this “catfight” we’d lay out almost the whole argument as it appeared on our recorder. (The conversation was fun, digressive and at times rounded back on itself, so we have made a couple of insignificant cuts for readability. we trust either or both of them will let us know if we've altered the context.)  read more »

It was another gorgeous day today in Washington. The White House Correspondents Association dinner weekend has been bathed in sunshine and warm but unoppressive weather. 

"I could use some whiskey," said Senator Craig Thomas of Wyoming in the elevator up to television host John McLaughlin's annual brunch on the Hay-Adams hotel rooftop, overlooking the White House.

"Ewww," said his wife Susan.  read more »

Today, Newsweek entered the political blogging arena with The Gaggle.

The weekly magazine's reporters will write the daily items, according to senior editor Weston Kosova, who is one of the blog's editors.

"We've been kicking it around for a while," said Mr. Kosova. "With the elections, it seemed like a good time to do it."

But was Newsweek's decision motivated at all by developments over at Time? Over the past year, Newsweek's rival has hired star political bloggers like Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) and former Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox (Political Bite).

"It really wasn't," said Mr. Kosova. "It seems like such an obvious thing to do. Everyone in the universe has one. We didn't feel a push from [Time]."

And the name?

"It's kind of a Washington expression for reporters," said Mr. Kosova. The idea was "to come up with something that said 'politics,' was catchy, and hadn't been used by someone else," he said.

- Michael Calderone

Picture a character like Entourage’s Ari Gold or Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko.  read more »

Time continues to bulk up its web presence, following their hirings of blogger Andrew Sullivan and web/print columnist Ana Marie Cox. Today, Time's White House correspondent Matt Cooper was promoted to Political Editor of Time.com, Time's deputy managing editor Steve Koepp announced. The internal memo follows. —Gabriel Sherman  read more »

Ana Marie Cox, the former editor of Wonkette.com and the author of Dog Days, has signed to be a columnist for Time and Time.com. She will file a weekly column on politics for the Web site and a monthly column in the magazine. Her first deadline is this week; this past Thursday, at the D.C. bureau offices, she had the photo taken that would accompany the column.

A press release will be issued by Time early this week, for which Cox submitted a quote. It is: "My only regret about selling out to Time is that it didn't happen earlier. I hope to put the 'stream' in Mainstream Media."

Cox will be joining fellow mainstream-journalist-turned-blogger-turned-mainstream-journalist Andrew Sullivan, whose arrival at Time was feted by managing editor Jim Kelly earlier this month.

Over the past week, Ana Marie Cox's debut novel, Dog Days, has netted three -- count 'em! one-two-three -- articles in The New York Times. And none of their authors seem to be on quite the same page. Janet Maslin (1/3): "Dog Days manages to be doubly conventional: it follows both an old-fashioned love-betrayal-redemption arc and the newer, bitchier nanny-Prada chick-lit motif...Any smart Web site would mock her [protagonist's] final gesture: turning on her laptop and writing the opening lines of this book." Christopher Buckley (1/8): "...if this sparkly, witty - occasionally vicious - little novel is any indication of Wonkette's talent, then Cox ought to log out of cyberspace and start calling herself Novelette." David Carr (1/5): "Dog Days is like a lot of first-time novels in that it takes the author's day-to-day existence and heats it up a few notches...the plot is on the hoary side." [He also calls Cox "a Katharine Hepburn with a severe case of potty mouth.") If the Times continues apace, its writers may just exceed the book's own word count with alternate expressions of praise and political piñata-whacking.  read more »