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Jamie McIntyre craved experimentation. A former CNN national security correspondent, McIntyre hosted a daily blog called Line of Departure (now Carl Prine’s Line of Departure), a reference to military mapping—the line from which a force advances on the enemy.1 On November 3, 2009, McIntyre posted a message online—“Going ‘Rogue’ or ‘Rouge’: Is Sarah Palin Still Crack Cocaine to the Blogosphere?” Next to the post he added a picture of the cover of a recently released autobiography by the failed 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate as well as the cover of a competing and far less flattering biography about Palin. Almost immediately comments piled up. The experiment was a success. The Sarah Palin experiment in social networking had as little to do with Sarah Palin as Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment had to do measuring memory. McIntyre admitted as much in his blog: I was over at the Washington Post the other day, talking to Chris Cillizza, author of one of the Post’s most successful political blogs, “The Fix.” We were discussing what makes a blog successful, and whether the “quantitative” measures or “qualitative” measures were more significant. It turns out that some blog topics are such hot button issues they generate a lot of comment, debate, reaction whether or not they actually have much new to say. And he said the prime example of that is Sarah Palin. Anything he [Cillizza ] writes about Sarah Palin, no matter how innocuous is . . . pretty much a guaranteed numbers generator. So I thought I would try an experiment by posting an item about Sarah Palin, including a link to her new book, Going Rogue and its ‘evil twin’ a new book by her detractors, entitled Going Rouge. Cheerleaders, PornograPhers, and uneMPloYed engineers ​ 5 162 Cheerleaders, Pornographers, and unemployed engineers 163 McIntyre had said nothing of substance in his post yet he managed to spark a rabid online debate among his readers just by mentioning Sarah Palin. The Cillizza hypothesis proved correct. McIntyre’s experiment proved to be a small exercise in dominating cyber high ground. For a brief moment he commanded the left end of the power curve, at least for the readers of Line of Departure. The Sarah Palin experiment was neither the first nor the last experiment Jamie McIntyre conducted online. In fact, Jamie McIntyre had pretty much turned his whole life into an experiment. McIntyre had decades of experience as a professional newsman. He spent twelve years with WTOP, an all-news radio station in Washington, DC, working as an editor and reporter. For three years he hosted an Emmy-awardwinning news show on a local television station. For a couple of more years he worked as the “Voice of C-SPAN.” Then, after long career of yeoman service as a frontline reporter, McIntyre went big time. From 1992 to 2008 McIntyre had a high-profile job as the CNN Senior Pentagon and Military Affairs Correspondent. His beat ran from the White House to war zones, from the US intervention in Somalia in 1992 to the invasion of Iraq. Whenever soldiers were in harm’s way, McIntyre was in prime time. Few reporters on the national security beat were more well-respected than McIntyre. In 2007 he spearheaded an in-depth investigation into the death of Pat Tillman, a professional football player who had volunteered for combat duty in Afghanistan. McIntyre was nominated for an Emmy. He was living the dream. He had a high-profile job and an international reputation. Then he got canned. “I left CNN in 2008,” McIntyre recalled, “CNN was paying me a lot of money for something they were not interested in paying a lot of money for.” The business of journalism had changed a lot. “You’d think with two ongoing wars that would guarantee full employment for Pentagon reporters,” he said. The Internet, however, had transformed the economics of mainstream journalism. With so many sources of news on the World Wide Web, McIntyre pointed out, “there is no longer one source that is ‘the source of record’ and the value of the core news reporter is greatly diminished.” Beat reporters provide “context,” McIntyre explains. Their job is to help readers understand the issue. But mainstream journalism’s main concern is fighting for its share of attention from readers, and the depth of reporting has very little to do with that. What attracts readers and keeps them coming back is passion and that requires provoking outrage. “What the media thinks...

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