Anorak

Anorak News | Pyjamas Media Pulls The Plug On Bloggers

Pyjamas Media Pulls The Plug On Bloggers

by | 2nd, February 2009

PAJAMAS Media, so reported National Review, was “to replace the established media sources with a network of what [co-founders Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon] call ‘citizen-journalists.'”

No longer. The business model – what there was of one – has collapsed.

The main target was the New York Times, which Pajamas Media reporter Kenneth Anderson opined, facilitated “online cocooning of its smugly elite audience by ‘journalists’ whose task is not to spend time digging out new, expensive, and quite possibly important facts, but instead to create, care, stroke, tend, and feed little online forums where they interact with readers and create little communities of the like-minded.”

Like, er,  blogs?

PJTV brought us Joe the Plumber in Israel. A gimick. Like a tabloid, only with less humour.

Last week Simon told Pajamas affiliates that “we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009.”

In other words: the money’s gone.

The responses:

Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein:

“What this means is that as of April 1, I am officially out of work. So save going to a pay model, this site will likely have to shut down. Small price to pay for helping PJM pick up an audience and credibility during its ‘formative years.'”

Ace of Spades:

“One could figure out one’s quarterly payment just by eyeballing one’s Sitemeter. BlogAds paid okay, but there are always those patches where no one really wants to buy ads, making income kind of unpredictable.”

Simon explained:

Actually that part of our business has been losing money from the beginning, so the people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn’t happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole. [What’s their beef? I thought most of them were free marketeer libertarians or something.-ed. Go figure.]

Atlas Shrugs:

“They paid small blogs almost no dough — while prohibiting us from taking any other advertising. So I left. I thought they missed the boat, lost a golden opportunity to alter the direction of human history.”

Dennis the Peasant:

“Who called it from DAY fucking ONE? Who? I did. And who got it 100% fucking RIGHT? Who? I did. Right? Fuckin’ A, Baby!”

Tools of Renewal:

“I used to see the PJ fiasco as the result of greed, treachery, foolishness, and dishonesty. These days I see it more as the evidence of a curse. The US is declining very quickly… I believe that when people persist in really stupid behavior, and the stupidity of the behavior is obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense, and the behavior is easily avoided, the behavior probably has a supernatural origin. That explains the mortgage mess. It explains Obamamania. And it explains PJM… The right used to be blessed. Until maybe 2003, our star was rising. Maybe that’s because we were more closely attuned to God. Now we think we have to dump God in order to attract voters… But the right was stronger back when religious people had more power. And it will weaken more and more, as we get more desperate and distance ourselves from God.”

Simon:

“Old media seems to be collapsing around us, but a healthy democracy requires a healthy press.”

So how can money be made from politcs writing? Answer: it can’t.




Posted: 2nd, February 2009 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink