Storming the News Gatekeepers

Citizen journalism, she continues, is her entry into the political process, a way for "an outsider like me to play some sort of role" -- a curious statement since, years ago, she herself was a Washington player, a policy wonk who for a time served as the face of the Republican Party to African Americans, a regular on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal." But those days are over.

"Washington was physically making me sick," Anderson explains.

So she packed her bags, collected a list of clients for her policy consulting business and moved back to Brooklyn, which, as it happens, is named by Outside.in, a site that tracks 3,000 local blogs, as the "bloggiest neighborhood" in the country. Translation: In this fast-gentrifying borough, where the real estate market is a bona fide obsession, bloggers and their readers don't miss a beat. For almost three years, Anderson's been a full-time policy consultant and citizen journalist.

Anderson at Large is nowhere near as widely read or heavily linked as RedState or Daily Kos, the popular conservative and liberal blogs. Technorati, which tracks a site's number of links, says Anderson's blog has received 236 blog mentions, while RedState and Daily Kos, by contrast, have received 21,000 and 107,000, respectively.

But Anderson points to other successes. She's the first blogger to be a member of the Trotter Group, a 15-year-old association of well-known black journalists. And last summer, she was credentialed to cover the Democratic debate at Howard University.

On the night of the forum, Ms. CJ, sitting in the press room, wrote on her blog, "OK, I'm settled in and looking around. I see a lot of familiar faces from the mainstream media. As they deign to check out bloggers row, they may wonder who lets us in. I guess the debate about whether bloggers are journalists is over."

Says Anderson: "Look, everyone's trying to analyze what citizen journalism is, what its impact will be in this election. We, the citizen journalists, are figuring it out. You mainstream media folks are figuring it out. But whatever it is, there's no going back. We're here. Get used to it."