Making it easy to blog

This Atlantic article discussing how political muckrakers get the news media to carry negative articles about their opponents struck me as being very similar to the blog world. The article itself has a tone of "how could these evil people do this/look how sophisticated it all is" outraged/ironic slant, but really all these folks are doing are writing stories that 1) people want to read and 2) are easy to publish. Back when I was concerned with driving traffic to this blog, I would write posts to make them easy to link to, links being the life-blood of blogs because they bring in new readers. I would read other people's blogs, and write my posts so that they in some way would add value to the original post. I would keep my blog focused on a topic so people knew what to expect when they came to it. I'd keep my posts short. I'd make them easy to link to -- going as far as creating special URLs that were easy to put in emails. I would produce original, researched content and get that published on Wired or slashdot or kuro5hin or whatever. The point is that I worked hard to make things as easy for others to use as possible. The political operatives in the article seem no different.