BRITISH blogging is beginning to score some hits. Last week Holy Moly (holymoly.co.uk), the showbusiness gossip site, was the first to reveal that Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, once bit a colleague — while frustrated Conservative Party supporters said that they were turning to the internet to help get their message across.

That might appear small, but if the American experience is anything to go by, blogging will gradually develop into a medium in its own right, challenging the traditional authority of newspapers and broadcasters. Already, British audiences are growing rapidly, which means that influence and money will follow.

In the US, it was the Drudge Report (drudgereport.com) that first named Monica Lewinsky; powerline.com that humbled the CBS anchor Dan Rather, who had accused George Bush of dodging military duties; and it was bloggers that forced the resignations of Trent Lott, as Senate majority leader, and CNN’s head of news Eason Jordan.

Holy Moly may lack the brand recognition of Matt Drudge, but in the past 18 months, when development became more serious, the gossip site has added 150,000 subscribers to a weekly newsletter that reached only 3,000 readers before, and claims to be visited by 2 million unique users a month.

Stories are short; the site reads like a newspaper diary with attitude and the most recent mailout speculates that Jude Law has pulled out of appearing in Ricky Gervais’s forthcoming comedy Extras, and that Vinnie Jones has run up the biggest annual mobile phone bill of any individual in the UK (£18,000).

Holy Moly is based on the belief that the “best blogs come from people writing what they believe, with no agendas — these days it is very refreshing to hear that kind of authentic voice”, according to its founder, who prefers to remain anonymous in an attempt to maintain his site’s mystique and protect his day job at a television broadcaster’s online production arm.

A similar search for authenticity underpins Tim Montgomerie’s thinking. Montgomerie is a former adviser to the previous Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, and has raised £15,000 to launch conservativehome.com, a news and views website that is sympathetic to but independent of the Conservative Party.

Montgomerie’s belief is that “many are wiser than the few”, meaning that he hopes, optimistically, that readers will generate content. The site asks visitors to use the blog to “bring attention to stories in your local community or to the latest examples of BBC bias”, and its founder hopes that “new media can break down the old media monopoly”.

Holy Moly, meanwhile, is still largely seen as a source for newspaper stories, although the site is beginning to emerge as a competitor in its own right, as in the case of the Mark Thompson story. The future Director-General once bit a colleague in an act of horseplay that backfired, a tale recounted in an e-mail exchange that had been kicking around some Fleet Street newsrooms for several days.

But it was the website that was the first to publish, supported by a willingness to take more risk (it helps that Holy Moly has not been sued). “Mark Thompson was the perfect Holy Moly story: silly, stupid, surreal and 100 per cent true,” said Holy Moly’s webmaster, who decided after checking out the story overnight to “send it out to 150,000 people in 30 seconds”.

Every major newspaper picked it up, and the slew of ensuing questions prompted the BBC to confirm that it was true, leading to widespread publication the day after. Holy Moly was not credited, however. “Newspapers, and particularly the tabloids, are only beginning to admit how much they use Holy Moly and (rival) Popbitch for stories.”

In a sign of the growing optimism amongst bloggers Holy Moly hopes to start making money. For now the site is run part time, supported by a network of “about a hundred sources” but the idea is to provide an “alternative news feed” in conjunction with an unnamed broadcaster.

Advertisers, though, have been turned off by the explicit language that is used. “That would mean changing the editorial tone, which is the whole reason why people come to the site”.

British blogging is still essentially a hobby — Montgomerie is also running his Conservative site part time while he looks for more backing — but it is only a matter of time before internet bloggers lead the news agendas and claim their first scalps.

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