Open Mic: "Blogosphere
Open Mic: "Blogosphere" boom launches Pundit Review hosts into global talk radio
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“Blogosphere” Mic
boom
launches
Pundit
Review
hosts
into
global
talk
radio
Story By Gerry Boyle ’78
Photos By Tracy Powell
It’s approaching nine o’clock on a Sunday night, and in the WRKO
radio studios in the New Balance building in industrial Brighton,
Mass., talk-show hosts Kevin Whalen ’92 and Gregg Jackson ’90 are
counting down to air time. A producer has an embedded reporter
waiting to talk by satellite phone from Baghdad. Callers—from
Florida, Massachusetts, Chicago, Nevada—are beginning to stack up,
their names and locations listed on a computer monitor.
Whalen and Jackson review notes, divvy up topics for the coming
hour. Headphones go on, a lead-in runs ( Jackson saying, “The old
media is circling the drain. We’re doing the flushing.”), and the
producer gives the cue.
“He’s Kevin and I’m Gregg, and you’re listening to Pundit Review,
the voice of the new media. Our goal here on this show is to bring
you coverage and analysis of the stories and events which those in
the elite media routinely relegate to the back pages—or altogether
ignore,” Jackson begins, his voice filled with conviction.
Tonight it’s the Iraqi charter referendum. Embedded “blogger”
Michael Yon, a former Green Beret, has been on the scene. But first
Jackson and Whalen excoriate the mainstream media, charging
liberal bias and skewed, negative coverage of the Iraq war.
A self-described political junkie, Whalen left Colby after
graduation and headed for Miami. In the wake of Hurricane Andrew, he
started a house-painting business, doing one house after another in
Cutler Ridge and Homestead. The lifelong Democrat turned
smallbusiness owner said he found himself confronted by tax policies
and a government that seemed to be trying to make his life harder.
“When I was painting, I used to listen to Rush [Limbaugh],” he said.
“I thought, this guy isn’t the evil moron that everyone I know says
he is. He’s making a lot of sense to me right now.”
House painting was soon traded for a graduate degree in
communications and a public relations job at Raytheon, the defense
contractor. “That,” Whalen said, “is not a liberal culture.”
But for the guy responsible for doing the daily news clips for the
company’s CEO, it was a wealth of information, and soon after he left
Raytheon in 2001, Whalen was posting stories, links, and his own
opinions on a Web site he called Pundit Review. The word “blog,” (a
neologism from “web log”) had not yet made its way into the vernacular.
As Whalen headed south, Jackson went west, riding on a $68
cross-country bus ticket that deposited him in San Francisco with
two Colby friends. He soon worked his way into sales positions at
“The idea for the show was the new media, the blogs. The whole citizen-journalist movement.
. . . We wanted to do a talk-radio show, but instead of Imus—the same 20 people on all the
time, mainstream media, conventional wisdom—we want to bring in thought leaders from
the new media. Highlight those opinions because they were fresher, more unique.”
And via radio and live audio streaming on the Internet, across the
United States, and beyond, thousands of people are listening.
Eighteen months ago, Jackson, a medical-devices salesman by
day, had been a caller to conservative talk shows but never a host.
Whalen, an account executive with a Boston PR firm, posted his
conservative musings on his own blog (punditreview.com), read by
perhaps a few hundred friends and Web acquaintances.
Now, in testimony to the pair’s political passion, marketing savvy,
and the sheer force of the Internet and its emerging “citizen
journalist” bloggers, Whalen and Jackson sit at the microphones of a
50,000watt station in Boston’s highly competitive talk-radio market. The
station’s signal reaches from New Hampshire to Rhode Island. More
importantly, the Internet streams Pundit Review to thousands of
listeners around the world via the spidery threads of the “blogosphere.”
At first glance, it’s an unlikely story for the Colby pair, college
liberals who never set foot in a radio station until a year ago last summer.
Jackson, an administrative science major and economics minor, has
taken in more than 100 Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia shows over
the years and ran a business at Colby called Buck-a-Dog, selling hot
dogs on campus. Whalen was a pony-tailed government major from a
Boston family whose father was so Democratic that he described the
voting process to his young son this way: “You go into the booth and
you look for the ‘D’ next to their name,” Whalen said.
Both Whalen and Jackson voted for Bill Clinton in 1992.
Acquaintances at Colby but not close friends, they had their
conservative epiphanies on separate coasts.
E&J Gallo Winery, then moved to the medical equipment industry
—and politically to the right.
Jackson began attending rallies in support of George W (...truncated)