Maybe this —Michael Calderone’s description of Mediate.com Mediaite.com, the media-centric site founded by Dan Abrams and launched today — helps explain why I’ve been waiting minutes now for the site to load on my computer:

[Mediaite] brings navel-gazing to a new level.


Taking a quick run through the site, it’s not the columns about media issues of the day that’s likely to get the most attention out of the gate, but the dizzying assortment of rankings on the “power grid” — a who’s-up-who’s-down system with categories like top TV hosts, media moguls, magazine editors, and print/ online reporters (of which I somehow rank #77 of 283, between Susan Orlean and Ryan Lizza).

Want to navel-gaze at a new level? Maybe scan the “power grid” ranking for familiar names? Get in line and wait…

UPDATE: I’m finally on the site! Abrams, in a publisher’s note, promises Mediaite won’t be the Dan Abrams Post, that his “top of class” media writers (including Rachel Sklar, onetime HuffPo media editor; Glynnis MacNicol, formerly of FishbowlNY; and Steve Krakauer, a former TV Newserite,) will have editorial independence. The site, he writes, “is for the media, it’s about the media and it is part of the new media.”

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.