Orcinus in Print

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Neiwert left his job at MSNBC.com in the fall of 2002, to finish a book, and began his blog in January of 2003 after his wife got pregnant and they decided that he would stay at home to care for the impending baby. He likes the form, he says, because it's so democratic: Bloggers link to each other, link to published articles, post responses from readers, keep tabs on professional pundits and maintain ongoing vendettas against and alliances with other bloggers.

Neiwert, for instance, provides links to more than 100 other bloggers, including his old Salon.com buddy Atrios, who publishes the left-leaning blog Eschaton. He also cultivates a running polemic against conservative writer Andrew Sullivan, whose website is one of the most visited blogs on the world wide web. "My issues with Sullivan really revolve around his crappy journalism," he says. "He wrote a piece about hate crimes for the New York Times Magazine, for instance, that was oblivious to the reality of what hate crimes are all about. He just crudely misrepresented how the laws work, and I thought, 'This is somebody who's just writing straight out of his ass.'"