The Politico

“We’re mostly a bunch of newspaper hacks,” said Jim VandeHei, the executive editor of the political media entity Politico, which, if you are, statistically speaking, like most Americans, you are more likely to recognize as the somewhat obscure co-sponsor of some of this election season’s televised presidential debates than from its Web site, politico.com, or its printed Beltway cheat sheet, The Politico.

He was talking about himself and his boss, John Harris, whom he followed out of The Washington Post in 2006 to join the nascent Allbritton-owned media property amid some print-industry-rankling hubris.  read more »

Oops! Former Observer reporter Ben Smith, who now has a blog for The Politico that's a favorite of campaign junkies, wrote a post earlier today about this "independent pro-Hillary site," which offers to pay people $1 for every pro-Hillary comment they post online. He declared the site "the worst idea of the cycle."

Problem is, the site's a parody -- as posts like this one, on the benefits of dictatorship, or this one, which urges supporters to put Hillary bumper stickers on strangers' cars, make clear.

To be fair to Mr. Smith, many other people, including some of his own commenters and a blogger at DailyKos, also fell for it. He's since posted an update acknowledging the mistake.  read more »