Number Three With A Bullet

The new meta-news website Media-ite (which is just as hard to say as it is to spell has a running list of influential media personalities ranked Casey Kasum style. The top 3 are all New York Times columnists with Maureen Dowd running behind stablemates Krugman and Friedman. Here is their blurb on her individual page:

Maureen Dowd (born January 14, 1952) is a Washington D.C.-based columnist for The New York Times. She has worked for the Times since 1983, when she joined as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Then they have a very useless link to Wikipedia for more information. Because I'd never think of looking there.

The algorithm for this dopey horse rating system is highly suspect as it weighs various online metrics like Technorati and BlogBuzz (whatever that is) with things like print circulation and pageviews. And that is where this system falls apart. All the NYT columnists have the same pageviews and circulation which means they are just using the numbers for the Times as a whole for each individual. Lame.

Also, all three of these are widely syndicated and appear in newspapers all over the country, so their circulation numbers should reflect that. That is part of Dowd's influence. She is read widely outside the greater New York area, albeit on a delay as her column gets reprinted around the country.

And the real baffling part of the ratings is that somehow Michelle Malkin snuck her way up to number four. I understand that she is an internet phenom, but her print presence seems vastly overstated. Media-ite lists a print circulation of 763,530 which sounds wildly improbable. I have never seen her 'column' in a dead trees fishwrap anywhere.

The amazing part of Dowd finishing in the show position is that she does almost no online promotion at all. Her twitter is just links to her latest column, and those are probably produced in the bowels of the NYT online division somehow.

Still, bravo to Maureen for ranking so high. Even if it's only in Media-ite.

(h/t to The Zoo)