activist journalism grows
Breitbart News Network, a group of activist, conservative news sites -- including Big Government, Big Hollywood and Big Journalism -- said on Sunday evening that it was adding at least a dozen staff members as it opens operations based in Texas and London. Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, said that those offices were the beginning of an expansion that would add a new regional site roughly every 90 days. California, Florida, Cairo and Jerusalem have already been chosen as expansion sites, he said.
Mr. Bannon said he was taking his cue from The Huffington Post, the liberal news and commentary site that has been growing rapidly overseas. He said there was an audience hungry for his brand of activist journalism. "There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock, Tex., to London, England," he said.
Breitbart is now the 49th largest global site in the news category, according to Alexa Internet, a web traffic measurement site. Alexa also puts Breitbart's monthly traffic ahead of The Daily Caller and RedState but behind The Blaze and the granddaddy of conservative blogs, The Drudge Report.
Mr. Bannon said the operation was not quite profitable, but is lean, with only about 25 journalists, and an additional dozen or so coming on for the new sites.
The London operation will be run by James Delingpole, most recently a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, whose rants against climate change orthodoxy have been big drivers of web traffic, and by Raheem Kassam, the founder of TrendingCentral.com, a London-based conservative news site for English-speaking countries.