It doesn’t matter what journalist you speak to these days, they’re all freaked out about the cutbacks at every traditional media outlet around. Massive layoffs this week are rumored to be hitting a variety of publications. Circulations, and ad sales, are falling. Meanwhile, online readership — and online ad sales — continue to climb.

James Boyce addresses one of the consequences of this:

We are all journalists now. The border has been erased completely.

But the death spiral of legacy media makes the traditional political media self-congratulatory parade all the more painful to watch. While online news sites, I’m thinking Firedoglake for example, with great writers like Christy Hardin-Smith and Jane Hamsher, are getting 60,000 plus readers a day, noted DC pundits are writing for magazines and newspapers whose circulation is slipping fast and already, from a political readership point of view, well below that.

When the daily readership of the Huffington Post is 5 times that of the Boston Globe, who should get an interview first?

When the daily readership of Daily Kos is 20% higher than the LA Times, whose endorsement will matter more?

Now, many legacy media folks will be grinning now, scratching their heads, and dismissing my talk as the rantings of a lunatic.

But it’s not me speaking, it’s the marketplace screaming out loud.

David Sirota recently wrote about how the incoming Obama administration is largely staffed with conservative policy people, and progressive political appointments — i.e., the people crafting policy are essentially conservative, while the people tasked with packaging and selling the policy are progressives:

While there’s not enough evidence to declare a full-on "trend" in the incoming Obama White House, it is notable that Obama’s policy appointments (ie. Cabinet secretaries and White House policy advisers who actually craft policy) are almost all right-of-center, Establishment choices – and almost none are, as The Nation’s Chris Hayes has said, movement progressives. At the same time, many Obama appointments to exclusively political positions – that is, positions that are focused on selling policy, whatever that policy may be – are terrific movement progressives, people like Mike Lux (transition outreach to progressive orgs), Ellen Moran (communications director), Phil Schiliro (congressional liason) and Patrick Gaspard (political director). In other words, the initial structure seems to resemble the principle in American politics of politicians publicly selling their policies in progressive terms, while having those policies be crafted with much more conservative ideology.

The question remains, Sirota noted, as to how they will function together. Will the political people have any power of their own, or will they merely be considered pitchmen who are supposed to make bitter conservative pills easier for progressives to swallow?

We got to see the machinery in action yesterday, when Pach wrote a post about his inquiry to the progressive pitchmen asking for confirmation about Obama’s commitment to the Employee Free Choice Act after Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel did not mention it as one of the administration’s priorities and implied that they might be willing to trade it for health care.

The spokespeople said that they weren’t empowered to respond.

Yet today, a statement was given to Sam Stein of the Huffington Post confirming Team Obama’s commitment to Employee Free Choice.

It appears that even though the progressive "handlers" have no power, the question Pach publicly asked reverberated at a level that someone thought it demanded an answer.

And in the process, questions asked by Boyce and Sirota got answered too, I think.

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