Flammable Pajamas Media
February 1, 2009 / 1:28 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierI can’t imagine a worse business position to be in than having to fire a bunch of bloggers. It must stink. Bloggers have a platform on which to air business grievances and for some, their stock in trade anyway is, well, grievances. Worse, I can’t imagine having to fire some of the best bloggers on the web. I can’t imagine continuing successfully being frozen out by those bloggers down the road.
Last Friday, turns out that most, if not all, Pajamas Media affiliated bloggers got the boot. Roger Simon, CEO, said that there just wasn’t enough money to continue. It’s not surprising that another business is feeling the economic pinch especially since ad dollars are scarcer than Britney Spears undies. Still, the pain it is causing is real.
Unlike others in this profession, I didn’t think PJM had a bad business model. In fact, I thought it was pretty smart. Take the best bloggers on the web, and talk to advertisers who would have their ads seen by thousands of readers across many different venues. Plus, the bloggers themselves would have money to count on so they could relax and focus on blogging.
When friends started getting the invites I watched with a mixture of jealousy and admiration. I was still a newbie though, had a young baby and a special needs child, plus for a year, homeschooling. My life was busy and my blog reflected a hectic schedule. I had no pressure. My blog posts tended to be long winded or short or whatever I felt like. At the start, it wasn’t so much about quality as it was just getting something out there and connecting to an intellectual world while stuck at home.
Other people, like Ann Althouse, were offered a position and took the moral high road. No way. No pay. Ann felt it would inhibit her independence. I didn’t think much of that argument then. I mean, who would police the bloggers? Turns out, that didn’t happen. But I respected Ann’s choice. Plus she, like my co-blogger John Hawkins made money with BlogAds, something I occasionally do myself. As Ann says, things have been slow since the election.
Pajamas leadership decides now, to turn toward TV. Now this, I don’t get. I’ve learned the hard way that video doesn’t work well with blogging. John Hawkins and I got in an argument about it. He said readers don’t watch them, they prefer transcripts. Well, that is just irritating because that means I have to transcribe which takes time and I don’t ever have enough time. So, I polled the readers and sure enough, they reinforced what John said. Due to server and bandwith constraints or just the stress of audio in the work place, people didn’t watch videos. They couldn’t.
I’m not saying videos aren’t a good idea generally. In fact, I feel like one thing that is missing on the conservative side are good, humorous short videos demonstrating leftist stupidity and/or teaching conservative principles in a funny way. Still, I’m not sure people would pay for them. Advertisers, though, might like to advertise on those…especially ones that go viral.
Anyway, times are tough all over. Writers are becoming commodities. There are a lot of great writers out there. There are no guarantees in the business.
The people who do it for fun and don’t make a living out of it might ultimately be in better shape. Ann Althouse is a lawyer. Other bloggers like Outside the Beltway’s James Joyner have talked about it before–that making money has been secondary to just saying how he feels. Plus, he has a “real” job. Now, I see that he, too, uses blogads.
The writers let go by PJM will survive. They are some of the best and brightest. I think that the bottom line is that many are artists not business people. Two different skill-sets. It helps to have both.
