Just Some Guy With a Website

I've been reading a new blogger who goes by the nom de Net CableNewser. It's a comment and news blog on the cable news industry. The New York Times has just published an article on CableNewser and surprise, surprise!

It turns out that CN, who just scored his first "scoop" this week on CNN's soon-come broadband Internet news "channel" and who counts a whole lot of big media names among his readers, is an 18-year-old college student!

Better to be anonymous than to identify himself as a teenager, he reckoned, if he wanted to be taken seriously. And that, it seems, he has been: Mr. Stelter has heard from cable executives, media critics, on-air personalities like the Fox anchor Greta Van Susteren, and network public-relations people who check his site.

"I get more scoop from Cablenewser.com about the industry and even MSNBC and than I get from the water cooler at the office," said Dominic Bellone, a producer for the MSNBC political show "Hardball." "I've been reading his blog close enough that it's pretty credible without me knowing who it is, because he's quoting legit sources."

While I'm no CableNewser -- he gets around 3500 daily hits to my 100 or so; he sticks to a single topic in depth, while I blog on a variety of things -- it just goes to show: the landscape is changing, and changing fast.