• A piece on the influence of Ayn Rand in the conservative movement. (3/6/09)
• A look at the GOP’s much-heralded, but mind-boggling, charts. (3/26/09)
• Photos from the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot. (4/6/09)
• The inside scoop on a civil war in the right-wing blogosphere. (4/21/09)
• A piece on the damage done to Tom Tancredo by his racist, karate-chopping confidant. (6/2/09)
• A conversation with Jim DeMint, where the senator compared America to pre-World War II Germany. (7/9/09)
• A prescient account of the dilemmas the “birther” movement threatened to cause the GOP. (7/17/09)
• An early look at the problems birthers were causing moderate Republicans at town hall meetings. (7/20/09)
• A glimpse of Saul Alinsky’s surprising new fan base. (8/11/09)
• An exclusive look at a propaganda-filled health care “survey” from the RNC. (8/27/09)
• A report from inside the How to Take Back America Conference, where fear of fascism and a “gay agenda” dominated. (9/28/09)
• Ahead-of-the-curve coverage of the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, where a Tea Party candidate split the GOP vote and led to a Democratic victory. (11/19/09)
• A spotlight on conservative attacks on Mike Huckabee for granting clemency to a future suspect in the shooting of four police officers. (11/30/09)
• A look at the strange campaign of the antiwar Republican Adam Kokesh to unseat John McCain. (12/18/09)
• A series of conversations with key Republicans who expressed their unwillingness to embrace party-switcher Parker Griffith. (12/22/09)
• A preview of Tucker Carlson’s journalism venture, The Daily Caller. (1/17/10)
• An investigation of the “perfect storm” that led to Scott Brown’s Senate win. (1/20/10)
• A heated conversation between Andrew Breitbart and Joseph Farah over the value of “birtherism.” (2/6/10)
• An account of growing pessimism among Tea Partiers that the passage of health care reform could be prevented. (3/17/10)
• After reports of the RNC’s lavish spending, a look at past conservative donor frustration with RNC habits that made the latest incident the “nail in the coffin.” (4/2/10)
• And, finally, a heartfelt farewell. We miss you too, Dave.

Tucker Carlson (ZUMA Press)

The offices of The Daily Caller evoke a long-ago era of journalism, circa 2005 or 2006, before the Los Angeles Times closed its big-city bureaus, The Washington Times fired 60 percent of its staff, and magazines from Gourmet to Portfolio shuttered for lack of revenue. A staff of 21 reporters and editors sit in blindingly white offices and a wide-open center space, cranking out content for the site’s January 11 launch. Other possible hires walk in and out of Editor-in-Chief Tucker Carlson’s office, past a lounge inhabited by liquor bottles and a sleeping dog, and decorated by clocks that tell the time in far-flung and random locations: Pyongyang, Jackson Hole, Washington, Honolulu.

“I just thought it was funny,” said Carlson, chewing on a piece of Nicorette. (He quit smoking last year, on his 40th birthday.) “We dispatched some intern to go and get those signs made. Actually, it was $150 — I never would have done it if I’d thought it would be so expensive. But something about it amused me. They’re on velcro. We swap ‘em out — we’ve got a whole drawer full of ‘em.”

[GOP1]Last February, Carlson — the conservative former host or co-host of shows on CNN and MSNBC, and still a Fox News contributor — gave a speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in which he urged activists on the right to “copy” the journalistic model of The New York Times. “They need to get out, find out what’s going on, and not just analyze things based on what the mainstream media has reported,” Carlson said. He was roundly booed. Four months later he officially announced plans to launch a news site “along the lines of The Huffington Post” with an ideology “not in sync with the current program.” When he talked with TWI on Wednesday, Carlson suggested that the desire for news like that, and the potential to break big stories, was greater than ever.

“When was the last time you saw, on television, a straight explanation of what’s in the competing House and Senate health care bills?” Carlson asked. “What’s in them? People want to know that!”

In the time between that announcement and next week’s debut, Carlson and his partner Neil Patel — a former aide to Dick Cheney — raised money, scouted out staff (“we didn’t ask about ideology,” said Carlson) and held poker games at their original, grimier office in Washington’s Dupont Circle. A June launch date was pushed into autumn, and then pushed back again. The reason, explained Patel, was that “our aspirations kept growing.”

“The size of the staff is much bigger than we started with,” Patel said. “We were very lucky to get the amount of money we did based, basically, on a PowerPoint.”

As they convinced funders and advertisers that the online journalism model was viable — “two years ago, who would have thought that The Huffington Post would get more traffic than The Washington Post?” — they expanded the scale of the enterprise. When they go live, it will be with more than $3 million in start-up capital, enough to run the site for at least a year.

That site will bear as much of a resemblance to The Huffington Post — the juggernaut that now clocks around 17 million hits per month — as Carlson speculated that it would back last summer. According to Carlson, there will be at least one editor monitoring and posting stories “24 hours a day, around the clock, in the office.” The top story of the moment will run at the top of the page, with more content running beside it. Stories written by the magazine’s reporting team, which includes Washington Times veteran Jon Ward and Government Executive’s Gautham Nagesh, will be cycled in, marked as “DC Exclusives,” much the way that stories by Huffington Post reporters trade space with headlines that link to stories from other publications. A staff blog — possible names include “Caller ID” and “The Daily Trawler” — will indulge in more humor, some of it written by long-time conservative blogger Jim Treacher (real name Sean Medlock) who moved to Washington from Indianapolis after Carlson gave him a call. And an iPhone app is on the way.

“Tucker is one of the most talented journalists I know,” said Ana Marie Cox, a host and reporter for Air America Radio who spars with Carlson in online chats hosted by The Washington Post. “Given free rein, he’ll definitely produce something interesting, compelling, and conversation-starting. Whether that thing can wind up being a financial success, I have no idea. If I could answer such questions I would not be a journalist.”

Carlson and his staff are spending the final hours before the launch polishing off content that can break out of the gate — exclusive interviews, lists like the Top 15 Most Wasteful Stimulus Projects, and short features from think tankers and established politicos. Arianna Huffington will have one of the first pieces on the site. Carlson, who started his career as a magazine writer, is working on an investigative piece for later. When Carlson talked to TWI on Wednesday, he had a wallet full of business cards handed to him by excited political candidates, Tea Party activists and PR flacks who’d heard him speak at Grover Norquist’s weekly meetings of the conservative movement. It was the first time, said Carlson, that he’d ever gone to the meeting. He wanted as much news, and as many stories, as possible. Whether they came from ax-grinding researchers or established reporters didn’t much matter.

“If there’s a story whose facts are verifiable, and it generates interest, and it comes from Satan himself, I will take it and I will pay him a reporting fee,” Carlson said. “But if we take a piece from Satan, that does not mean we’re on board with Satan’s agenda. It just means that the provenance of the piece, the origins of the piece, is not the most important thing. People don’t give you stuff because they love journalists. They give you that stuff because they’re pushing an agenda.”

The New York Times-style investigative journalism that Carlson has told conservatives to cultivate will not largely come, as the Times’s investigations come, from inside the organization. The Daily Caller is taking one page from Andrew Breitbart, whose biggest story — a multi-city hidden-camera investigation of ACORN — came from two freelancing conservative conservative activists. The Daily Caller’s investigative pieces will come from outside; some will develop in-house, but most are being sought out from the ever-expanding population of journalists who need work. “Our view,” said Carlson, “is that there are enough seasoned freelance journalists out there that you can let them do it.”

Veterans of other new media start-ups are sold on what they’ve heard about the “HuffPo of the Right.” Conor Friedersdorf, a freelance journalist who worked for the short-lived site Culture11, contrasted Carlson’s focus on journalism with the much-praised, quick-hitting tactics of Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism.

“I hope that The Daily Caller aspires to produce writing that is as well written and professionally edited as the stuff that the talented Tucker Carlson writes for Esquire,” said Friedersdorf. “The alternative — the Andrew Breitbart model — is to publish poorly reasoned, atrociously edited screeds on the cheap, on the assumption that ideologically friendly readers will keep clicking anyway.”

Carlson’s full-time staff, still taking shape this week (Helen Rittelmeyer, slated to be a reporter, left Monday for a job at National Review), is skewed toward younger reporters who had, in his view, the “energy and temperament” for the job. They don’t have hard quotas for blog posts, articles, or pageviews. They seemed ready to work hard without that.

“I keep reading all of these Nick Denton memos for Gawker,” said Carlson, “these ferocious memos to writers where it’s like ‘get a million pageviews this week or you’re fired!’ Maybe we’ll have to do that! But it’s not my personality at all.”

Whenever he’s asked, Carlson will happily admit the lofty goals he’s set for the site. It’s got to fill the gap that the “pathetic” media has left in coverage of how government works. It’s got to generate buzz and drive the conversation, getting stories that other media have to chase and topping a million page-views a month, “although one word I’ll never use is ‘metric.’” It’s got to be fun. That’s the point of the foreign clocks and the random posters Carlson has placed around the office. But there’s the occasional strange found object that makes a greater point, like the photo of a joyful Korean businessman perched on top of his store during the L.A. riots, holding a rifle.

“Because he’s taken the time to defend himself with a firearm,” explained Carlson, “he’s not going to be victimized by the racist mobs below. He is smiling. That’s a smile that reflects both his self-satisfaction and also the promise of America. The promise of America is ‘We’ll let you do what you want, as long as you defend yourself.’ I just love that. I’ve had that over every desk I’ve ever had as an adult.”

The invitation is below the jump.

Clockwise from top left: Byron York, Michael Barone, David Freddoso and J.P. Freire (YouTube screenshots)

For the first few years of George W. Bush’s presidency, Mark Tapscott was a journalist without a newsroom, shouting from the sidelines about his industry’s swift decline. Tapscott ran the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy, and trained reporters in the use of technology for research and crunching numbers. When he considered how few conservatives, libertarians, or real skeptics of federal power were working in newsrooms, he saw a problem that was making the growth of government possible.

“The [Freedom of Information Act],” Tapscott wrote in a 2004 commentary, “has been subverted from its original intent – shining light in all corners of the federal establishment – and used instead by the bureaucrats, special interests and politicians who live off the Nanny State, especially those hiding behind closed doors in places like Health and Human Services, the Education Department and Housing and Urban Development.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Sitting up straight in his office at the Washington Examiner, where Tapscott has been the editorial page editor for three years, he repeats the point. “There are 57 people in the Freedom of Information Hall of Fame,” he says. “Three of them are conservatives — two of them, if you don’t count me. Now, that’s a problem.”

Since its launch in 2005, the second daily metro newspaper owned by conservative billionaire Phillip Anschutz (the first was the San Francisco Examiner) has struggled for an identity in a city crawling with political journalists. But since the November 2008 election, the Examiner has beefed up its staff and pulled prominent right-leaning reporters and pundits away from publications like The American Spectator and National Review. Tapscott and a growing staff of political and opinion writers are carving out an identity as the conservative version of the left-leaning opinion and investigative journalism sites that — in the view of many conservatives — have used reporting to embarrass conservatives and the Republican Party.

It wasn’t always this way. In 2004, Tapscott and many other conservatives looked at the reporting and fallout of a badly flawed CBS News report on President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard as a watershed moment, the arrival of a form of citizen journalism that could do distributed research and bring down media titans. Tapscott was awed by the “reporting power demonstrated by the blog leaders in Rathergate such as Littlegreenfootballs.com and [Powerlineblog.com],” he wrote at the time. And in 2006, Tapscott joined forces with conservative and liberal bloggers to uncover the identity of a senator who put a hold on anti-earmark legislation. But conservatives point to that period as the tipping point when liberal-leaning sites like Talking Points Memo, whose Muckraker blog chased the “secret hold” story, overtook conservative sites. By the time that voters went to the polls to elect Barack Obama, conservatives saw sites such as TPM, The Huffington Post, Media Matters, Pro Publica, and the Center for American Progress as part of a new left-wing conspiracy. The Examiner has beaten other outlets to the punch in putting together a right-leaning answer to that.

“I don’t think TPM has any special claim to the type of reporting we do,” said Josh Marshall, the editor of TPM. “If the Examiner wants to get reporters down into the weeds holding the administration and Congress to account with tough, by-the-books reporting, I think that’s not only possible but a great thing.”

If a number of other conservative publishers have their way, the Examiner will get more competition. PajamasMedia, the blog conglomerate that grew out of the “Rathergate” story, is talking to potential reporters for an investigative journalism site. Jennifer Rubin, the site’s Washington editor, declined to discuss the plans but pointed to the site’s coverage of anti-tax “Tea Parties” as proof that “the old model of elite journalists peddling liberal opinion as ‘objective reporting’ is dying.” NewMajority.com, an opinion-heavy site launched by conservative writer David Frum on Inauguration Day, employed former Republican National Committee staffer Moira Bagley as an investigative reporter, but published only 11 of her stories before letting her move on in mid-February. Journalist and commentator Tucker Carlson is currently interviewing conservative journalists for a new site tentatively called The Daily Caller, although he declined to discuss it with TWI, explaining that he had “launched too many ventures that were heavily publicized before they were prepared for scrutiny.”

But Tapscott’s paper has gotten there first. After Anschutz’s Baltimore Examiner newspaper was closed in February, more resources were allocated to the Washington paper. They’ve been used to scoop up talent from other conservative media. Tim Carney wrote a column about the lobbying industry while still editing the Evans-Novak Political Report; when founder Robert Novak decided to shutter it in January, Carney moved to the Examiner full-time. One week later, the paper hired Byron York away from a nine-year stint National Review, where he’d been the magazine’s lead political reporter. At the start of June it poached David Freddoso also of National Review, the reporter who’d written the bestselling “The Case Against Barack Obama” for Regnery, and it hired J.P. Freire, who had recently left The American Spectator, to be the managing editor of the editorial pages.

In his modest office, a short walk away from the Examiner’s newsroom, Tapscott can’t pour enough praise on the new hires or on the columnists that have been added to the paper’s lineup, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, and political encyclopedia Michael Barone, hired away from U.S. News and World Report. Scott Ott, a political satirist who won fame in the conservative blogosphere for his site “Scrappleface,” now puts his satire in a weekly column. In a 2004 blog post, Tapscott had mulled over what could happen if a newspaper grabbed fresh political commentary and put it in one place. “If The Washington Post were to sign on Powerline not merely for weekly op-eds and/or the reprint rights but as members of the reporting team,” he speculated, “the Posties would have the collective talents, experience and insight of Hindrocket, The Big Trunk and Deacon to help shape the paper’s reporting agenda, assist in developing major stories and generate new sources for the reporting staff.” Five years later, he’s doing just that.

According to Chris Stirewalt, the paper’s bow-tie-wearing political editor, that lineup has brought attention to the paper that’s also boosted the political coverage. “Two years ago,” says Stirewalt, “people were saying ‘Gosh, if only if there was a vertically integrated place where I could get all this stuff.’ I promise you that two years ago, nobody said ‘You know, if you have Barone and York and Carney and this kid in a bow tie writing columns in a newspaper it would be really cool. That was serendipity. Sometimes if the people are available and the money is there, things come together.”

The results so far: increased Web traffic (up 300 percent since January, according to Web editor Matthew Sheffield) and more attempts to shame federal agencies, members of Congress, and the White House. Some of it has gone largely unnoticed so far. The editorial page’s Kevin Mooney reports a feature called “Dirty Money,” in which he digs through databases to find out which officers or members of unions have been convicted of crimes and how much those unions have given to members of Congress, then calls up the members’ office to ask whether they’ll give the money back. To date, none of them have even given Mooney an on-the-record response; Tapscott hopes to tie that up into a scolding editorial.

York’s political reporting has had a greater calculable impact. In his columns and in his blog, York is given space to hound the White House about embarrassing stories that interest conservatives more than other newsroom’s editors. York wrote multiple pieces on a somewhat obscure complication that preceded Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) turning down an appointment as Commerce Secretary — whether or not the Census would be run from the Commerce Department or from the White House. Since last week, York has filed piece after piece on the firing of Gerald Walpin, an Americorps inspector general who has asked whether his investigation of the Democratic mayor of Sacramento was ended because the target is an ally of the president. Since the paper ran those first stories last week, the controversy has gone up the food chain to Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

Over the next few months, Sheffield wants to update the Examiner’s site to “integrate social media” and build on what’s already bringing links to the site from RealClearPolitics, Fox Nation, and conservative blogs. And this week’s purchase of The Weekly Standard by Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group was welcomed by Tapscott, who might have an even larger pool of conservative talent to draw on for his long-term project. “I am ecstatic about the move,” he said, “and the prospect of working with Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes.”