Pajamas Media, Rightblogger Meal Ticket, Pulls the Plug

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Pajamas Media, a consortium of mostly rightbloggers, was founded in 2005. Its "eventual goal," reported National Review at the time, was "to replace the established media sources with a network of what (co-founders Charles Johnson and Roger L. Simon) call 'citizen-journalists.'" They felt good about their chances; after all, said Simon, referring to Johnson, "You're sitting four feet away from the guy who ended Dan Rather's career." (If you don't remember who Dan Rather is, you can read the Wikipedia entry.)

Pajamas Media has retained a hard-on for the "MSM," its fans' preferred acronym for professional media outlets. In November Pajamas correspondent Kenneth Anderson told readers what was wrong with the online operations of the hated MSM flagship, the New York Times. Anderson said the Times 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."

Anderson did not seem to realize that his description far more accurately applies to Pajamas Media. While the Times continues to share actual news with its online readers, Pajamas mostly eschews this -- except for adventures like the fanciful "reporting" of Joe the Plumber in Israel -- in favor of citizen opinion journalism via a number of affiliated blogs, who were cut in for a piece of the revenues via the Pajamas network.

Maybe "revenues" isn't the right word, as rumor had it that most of the money was still coming from investors. Nonetheless Pajamas personnel continued to portray themselves as the future, and MSM journalism as a fading relic. One correspondent traced the MSM's decline to Monica Lewinsky, leaving America "convinced they sold their soul to a devil with a blue dress on." Others gallantly offered to replace the MSM in foreign reporting: "PJM reaches millions of people and they sent a video camera to me in Afghanistan."

But as with all things, eventually money talked and bullshit walked. Last week Simon told Pajamas affiliates that "we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009," and thereafter they would be free to hustle up ads as best they could."

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[Alamuti Lotus]

1. but now what will that doofus Joe The Plumber do?

Will he have to...gasp...go back to being a bad plumber?

[MUAD_DIB]

5. You mean a bad unlicensed plumber.

[MineralMan]

2. This is very good news!

But what will all the little humunculi in the reich wing do now?

[Ikonoklast]

3. Chalk up another Republic right-wing failure to control the discourse.

All they ended up doing is sit in a circle and talk to themselves.

I wonder if any of those idiots figured out just making shit up and posting it on the web doesn't count as 'journalism'.

[azurnoir]

4. So pajamas media is being put to sleep?

wonder if Joe's ticket was one way or round trip maybe they need plumbers in Israel