This year’s unusually competitive presidential primary has led some of Brooklyn’s own media elite to an unusual decision: for the first time, some local news outlets made endorsements in the national race.

“I don’t know how much difference it makes,” said Ed Weintrob, who publishes The Brooklyn Paper, a weekly. “But we felt collectively we should let people know what our thinking is. Hopefully they’ll consider our points.”

The paper frequently endorses local candidates, but never in Weintrob’s memory has it endorsed a presidential prospect.

“People had different levels of emotion,” Weintrob said, “but we all agreed.”

The endorsement sites Senators John McCain and Barack Obama as the candidates “most likely to restore America’s position as a shining beacon to the world.”

Other local media, including the blogs “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn,” and “The Brooklyn Optimist,” also endorsed Obama.

Louise Crawford, author of “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn,” has been blogging about the borough for four years.

For Crawford, endorsing Barack Obama was as much an attempt to make up her own mind as influence others’. She said that writing down her thoughts “organized her thinking.”

Crawford doesn’t believe she’ll single-handedly convert legions of Brooklynites to Barack, but said “it’s going to influence people, one way or the other.”

“People want to pick my brain just like I want to pick other people’s brains,” Crawford said.

Brooklyn has 1,150,000 registered voters; The Brooklyn Paper publishes 52,000 copies weekly. “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn” gets between 2,000 and 3,000 hits a day.

An unscientific exit poll on Super Tuesday found no awareness of the endorsements, and a broader antipathy to the practice.

Williamsburg voter Nathan Ewing said that he was “not even remotely” aware of the local endorsements. “I try to find out about the candidate based on my own information,” Ewing said. “Not what someone else tells me.”

Both The Brooklyn Paper and “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn” cited intangibles over policy for choosing Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton.

“We don’t want to go through another four or eight years of antagonism,” Wentrob said. “The viciousness of the opposition to the Clintons is known, we lived through it. The Clintons feel the same antagonism towards their opponents. It’s a mess. With Obama there’s hope.”