[em]Newsweek[/em] Launches Politics Blog

Today, Newsweek entered the political blogging arena with The Gaggle.

The weekly magazine’s reporters will write the daily items, according to senior editor Weston Kosova, who is one of the blog’s editors.

“We’ve been kicking it around for a while,” said Mr. Kosova. “With the elections, it seemed like a good time to do it.”

But was Newsweek‘s decision motivated at all by developments over at Time? Over the past year, Newsweek‘s rival has hired star political bloggers like Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) and former Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox (Political Bite).

“It really wasn’t,” said Mr. Kosova. “It seems like such an obvious thing to do. Everyone in the universe has one. We didn’t feel a push from [Time].”

And the name?

“It’s kind of a Washington expression for reporters,” said Mr. Kosova. The idea was “to come up with something that said ‘politics,’ was catchy, and hadn’t been used by someone else,” he said.

– Michael Calderone