Ana Marie Cox got a nice front-page piece in this morning's L.A. Times' Calendar section...
Wag of the capital blog set
Welcome to the white-hot center of Washington's most salacious gossip. Never mind that it's a blue-trimmed house with a shaggy lawn plopped squarely in suburbia - Wonkette lives here, armed with a PowerBook and a wicked tongue.
For the uninitiated, Wonkette.com is the fearless political gossip blog generating buzz inside the Beltway and beyond, and Ana Marie Cox is the wit behind it.
Working from the snug periwinkle guest bedroom of the Arlington home that she shares with her husband, journalist Chris Lehmann, Cox is not exactly a reporter and not quite a stand-up comedian. Instead, the 31-year-old redhead is working the Jonathan Swift of the Information Age angle, a social satirist on instant messenger.
She posts a dozen times a day, deflating the egos peopling the nation's capital with an unexpurgated commentary ranging from the size of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry's, um, constituency to the latest "low-rent sex scandal" to assail Washington. [...]
Wonkette.com, which launched this January, provided something that many felt was sorely lacking in town - a bona fide scandal sheet. "I think she's a great gift to Washington because she traffics in the kind of scurrilous yet necessary rumormongering that the capital desperately needs, and she does it well," said Richard Leiby, who writes the more staid - and more thoroughly fact-checked - Reliable Source.
That's what inspired Internet entrepreneur Nick Denton to conjure up Wonkette in the first place. "D.C., inexplicably for a place so powerful, didn't have anything with any kind of edge," Denton said.
The British blog magnate, also responsible for the gadget-savvy site Gizmodo, the New York media and celebrity rag Gawker and porn site Fleshbot, saw an opening in Washington and pounced. His newest Web address, Defamer.com, which launched last month, gives Hollywood a scathing once-over.
Denton brings British (read: sensational) journalistic sensibilities to the blogs he backs.
"American daily news is provided largely by monopolies; many of them are either lazy monopolies or otherwise pompous monopolies," Denton said. "The objective seems often to be winning Pulitzer Prizes rather than the amusement of the audience." Denton's sites are created in the British newspaper tradition, which is enlivened by furious competition and a no-holds-barred approach to everything from royalty to national leaders.
