There’s Weldon Berger’s BTC News, which added a White House correspondent, Eric Brewer, in 2005. (See Dan Froomkim on it.) At the time I didn’t catch the significance of Berger adding a White House reporter. Now I think it’s one of the smartest moves any political blogger has made; and I have been considering how PressThink might develop its own network of correspondents.

An example I continue to admire is Terry Teachout’s About Last Night, which has a second contributor, Laura Demanski. (“TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts in New York City, with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO” is says at the top.) I have considered in the past expansion by adding a second contributor.

There’s the more ambitious example of Chris Nolan (see her PressThink post, The Stand Alone Journalist is Here) who expanded her own blog, Politics From Left to Right, into a group of writers on politics, who range from left to right. Her new (and very handsome) site is called Spot On; it’s the home of six authors.

And there’s the example of Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall. He expanded by adding a spin-off site, TPM Cafe, which has a roster of talented part-time contributors and reader-written blogs. It also has comment threads (Talking Points Memo does not.) Marshall will soon debut a second spin-off. TPM Muckraker, for which he has raised money.

Rosen clearly thinks that these moves are a good thing, but I'm not so sure.

When I first began reading weblogs (and dithered around about starting one of my own for several years before I actually did so), the majority of the sites that I read were individual ones, or at most two-person affairs, in which the voice and views of the proprietor(s) rang out loud and clear. I read the blogs I settled on as my regulars because I wanted to hear those voices, to see what those people had to say on a daily basis. Reading weblogs, and commenting on them, felt personal, because that's what it was, a personal interaction between the blogger and his or her readers.

To some extent, partly because of the increase in the blog-reading audience causing a dilution of the relationship between blogger and reader, but also because of the expansion, consolidation, groupification (for want of a better word) and professionalisation of weblogs, that personal experience has been much diminished. It's much rarer now to have a single blogger be responsible for the vast majority of a weblog's content, and much more usual to see group efforts and mega-blogs. It seems as if everyone is trying to be a mini-Daily Kos or to emulate the growing TPM empire. (dKos throws off privileged front-page writers at regular intervals, and it's understandable that they would then go off and start their own group blogs, like The Next Hurrah.)

These trends are part of two related phenomena we can see going on around us, the blurring of the lines between journalist and blogger (about which too much has already been said) and the growth of a professional or quasi-professional blogging corps. It's no longer unusual to see one writer posting her or his material on multiple blogs, much as freelance writers will shop their work around to different periodicals, and the writers who do so collectively constitute the blogging corps.

This was probably all inevitable once massive attention was turned on the blogging world: people who write a lot understandly want to get paid for it, and it's better to have multiple reliable sources of income rather than one uncertain one. (And note, I'm not claiming that the average professional blogger is making big bucks from their efforts, or that the mega-sites are motivated by profits instead of getting opinions out to the public or organizing political activity, I'm just noting that the professionalization is taking place, and it has ramifications.) The result is that reading the blogs has become less personal, more channeled, and somewhat less serendipitous.

I can see that people would rather write for a quasi-professional site which can guarantee an audience, rather that slog away at a personal weblog in obscurity, and I appreciate that the mega-blogs are providing good quality information and opinions, but I also miss the amateur quality of the blogosphere of yore -- "amateur" in the very best sense, of course.