Steve Benen offers a different angle on Matt Cooper:

Responding to this, Matt Yglesias explained, “The issue … isn’t that the right doesn’t have an outlet equivalent to TPM or other progressive sites. There are tons and tons of conservative media outlets, most of them with a web presence…. What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job.”

To that end, two major new media outlets have each made a major hire in recent weeks.

• TPM Media hired Matt Cooper, a 20-year veteran of political journalism and former White House correspondent for Time, to be a Washington correspondent.

• Pajamas Media hired Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, an unemployed, unlicensed plumber, to be a war correspondent in Israel.

“What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job.”

Even Steve’s post quotes me, I hadn’t thought about the Cooper/TPM thing in that light. But in retrospect, I do think that’s the right way to see it. Part of progressive media growing up is getting some big time people into the mix.

It’s certainly an interesting development that Josh Marshall’s decided to break with his previous practice and hire well-established MSM veteran Matt Cooper to head up his new TPM DC bureau and blog rather than the usually crew of scrappy underdogs. I’d count myself as pretty skeptical about this development, but I’m not really comfortable questioning Josh’s judgment on these sorts of things.

I worked on a very part-time basis for TPM Media in what I guess you’d call its larval stage and even though I was—and am—a huge fan of Josh’s writing, I didn’t think the more ambitious projects he had in mind were really workable. Obviously I was dead wrong about that and Josh and the people he hired went on to build one of the most amazing new institutions of our time. So we’ll see.