Saturday, January 31, 2009

... With A Whimper (Lots of Them)

I see by Scott Lemieux at LGM that Pajamas Media is closing down its blog advertising network. This was announced by head honcho Roger L. Simon (aka themanwhocreatedmoseswine) in an email that led with their glowing plans to concentrate on their new online TV thing, which so far has featured a small handful of wingnuts talking to each other and the sending of "Joe" the "Plumber" to Israel to be their hot new Mideast correspondent. TBogg has posted a copy of the email from Simon and added comments.

Reactions from the dependents and others on the periphery seem uniform (no one could have predicted!), accepting the loss of revenue fairly stoically, while expressing skepticism, with varying degrees of bitterness, about the idea of PJTV.

Serr8d, posting on Tennesseefree, is typical:

As if anyone wants to watch TV on the internet. Sheesh.

Oh, instead of watching some grumpy old farts lost in their Cosmic Sea, scoot over to YouTube and listen to this..at least you’ll stay awake.

Dalton McCallum at The American Pundit is a calm one, but bemoans the loss of citizen kerners, um, journalism:

PM seems to be restricting its “sending the mainstream media down the river…” operation to sanctioned writers on its official news website and talking heads, mostly mainstream, on its official video website.

AJStrata of the eponymous Sphere agrees:

It seem Pajama Media is kicking out the small fry so they can have more $$$ for themselves.

He then offers an explanation, which is nothing if not delightfully self-contradictory:

But the fact is traffic is down since the election - way down. [...]

I hope these wonderful voices are not silenced, especially in this time of conservative and GOP renewal.

Donald Douglas at American Power tries to be optimistic:

As for future of conservative media like Pajamas? Well, Andrew Breitbart just started Big Hollywood …

That sound you just heard was the entire leftosphere falling off its collective chair laughing.

The more severely deluded, like Pam of Atlas Shrugs, do not miss the opportunity to give voice to their favorite conspiracy theory:

I was one of the original pajama bloggers. I thought PJM was going to rival AP, UPI, Reuters. Finally, a news portal of citizen bloggers and journalists that would counter the Pali stringers and left wing biased journalists of the news gathering agencies. But PJM went off the rails. Simon decided to chase big names for big money, but to what end? Who needed another NRO or WSJ Best of the Web? And unlike the left, where Soros, Hollywood libtards and Google-type asshats embarrassingly fund the leftwing sites vis a vis Moveon.org et al, the right has none of that. None. We live on fumes. G-d bless our small advertisers and our readers who contribute.

Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom echoes:

It’s just that there’s no “conservative” equivalent of a Sorosugardaddy to fund the media on “our side.”

Not sure why "conservative" has to be in quotes, let alone "our side," but then there's a lot I don't understand about wingnuts. I'm also a little puzzled to hear Dan claim that there are no rich guys willing to fund rightwing media. This would probably come as a shock to those expecting to cash their next paychecks at the Weekly Standard, National Review, and my two favorite Orwellians, the Media Research Center and Accuracy in Media.

Moving along, Dan has a plan, and it involves more of his own special reality:

The Right needs to get its shit together, and perhaps even to influence a national candidate. That latter’s a lofty ideal from such humble origins as I propose, but if not us, then who? If we had ten Ric Lockes and ten Dan Collins each influencing ten apiece and so on, you can see that while this would take the next two presidential terms to develop, it’d still at some point grow to great substance. I continue to insist that the Left can have no such organic intellectual basis because it is based on parasitic theory and action and cannot therefore reveal itself, assuming it’s even self-conscious enough to do so, which is clearly debatable.

I maintain that only the classic Right can pin it’s anti-government, anti-corruption message to proven theoretical, moral, political, and even human principles. The Left is just where liars and thieves go. We need to take advantage of this.

He then goes on to describe building a new website, attracting Ace of Spades (CPAC Blogger of the Year!) and twenty other unnamed bloggers, wonders about "gain[ing] critical mass" (Must. Resist. Cheetos-loving. Rightblogger. Joke), copying something out of Wikipedia onto the site, and … I don't know. It gets strange. It begins to sound as though someone else has taken control of the keyboard, because though there is no blockquoting or other indication, the sentences are addressed to him; e.g.,

I have no idea how this would go over, Dan, but it strikes me …

Plagiarism? Multiple personality disorder? Just mumbling to himself? Who can say? [UPDATE: I see from Dan chastising other bloggers that apparently his co-blogger jumped in and added the later thoughts.]

Oddly enough, his co-blogger Jeff Goldstein says just three posts earlier:

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.

Tools of Renewal is harsher than most about the new online video thing:

PJM’s new hope is PJTV, a pay video site. Where you can pay to watch Glenn and Helen Reynolds. This is not unlike asking people to pay to be punched in the face. It will fail.

... passes along rumor:

The blogger who told me about the end of PJM’s blog network theorizes that the GOP is making PJM its main Internet outlet. That is highly plausible, in view of the unbelievably stupid things the GOP has done over the last few years.

... indulges in more of the same conspiracy-tinged victimology:

The left owns the web, and the web demonstrated its power by getting the left’s bizarre, whining, empty-suit President elected.

... before bringing the real crazy. You see, this is all part of a larger picture, according to Tools:

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. We’re not going to be the world’s leading nation any more. The economy may have a dead-cat bounce left in it, but we’re going into a recession which will never end. We’re going to settle permanently at a lower level of prosperity and power, and we may experience a near-depression on the way to that level. The self-destruction of conservatism is probably just one of the tools that will be used to work this judgment on America. Conservatism is right and natural and healthy, and it makes nations strong, so it has to be diminished in order for us to decay. The right’s mismanagement and abandonment of the Internet are just instruments of the right’s downfall.

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.

Whoa. If he didn't bring it back to PJM there, I'd really have been concerned that the last strand had snapped.

Rusty Shackleford at The Jawa Report is more phlegmatic:

Don't worry, the Jawa will remain. But I was just kind of getting used to the idea that people were going to pay me to surf jihadi websites and write stuff about it.

Also, to talk about Angelina Jolie's lesbian escapades.

Ah, the fantasies one dreams up in Mom's basement, eh, Rusty?

Althouse, though not a member, nonetheless feel compelled to add her two cents, or two thousand cents, more like, and inevitably works her discussion around to breasts. (Chorus? No one could have predicted!)

Last word from Roger L. Simon himself:

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. I might too.

As 3letterjon observed in TBogg's comments: Wingnut Welfare Reform! Hurrah!

P.S. More leftosnark from TS at Instaputz, Kevin K. at Rumproast, and Roger Ailes.

[Added] P.P.S. And more here.

1 comment:

ArtSparker said...

Tools of renewal must be a Manichean.

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