Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, Monday:

Howard Kurtz: The Washington Times is far more balanced since John Solomon took over last year. (Solomon came from The Post, as did its new White House correspondent, Matthew Mosk, and a top editor, Jeff Birnbaum.) In its previous two decades, the Times front-page often resembled a right-wing bulletin board, and its previous editor told me he regarded it as a conservative newspaper.

The Washington Times, today:

The Washington Times has launched TheConservatives.com, a Web site with technology that allows activists to talk up to ideological and party leaders and interact in innovative ways.

TheConservatives.com - a joint online media venture from The Washington Times and the Heritage Foundation - is a tool to “reinvent the right” and help move the public discourse.

“TheConservatives.com creates a cutting-edge new marriage between the social publishing world of bloggers and the social networking world of Twitter, YouTube and the like,” said John Solomon, executive editor and vice president for content of The Times. “Most opinion sites today enable thought-leaders to talk down to the masses, but TheConservatives.com empowers users to change the direction of that dialogue, allowing the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers, like Newt Gingrich.”

UPDATE: I should have included this, from the Washington Times article: “Mr. Solomon said similar Web sites that would appeal to progressive and moderate online readers are being considered.”

Oh, they're being “considered”? That's just super.

If I was trying overcome my newspaper's well-established history of acting as little more than a mouthpiece for the conservative movement, I probably wouldn't start by launching a web site called TheConservatives.com and promising that later, some day, if there's time, we'll think about adding a site for progressives.