Pajamas Media: Trouble in the blogosphere

Print journalism is cracking up, said Ross Douthat in The Atlantic, but we’re clearly a long way from finding “anything capable of replacing it.” Pajamas Media’s blogger ad network and Culture11—two examples of the “low-overhead, disaggregated, bloggy form of journalism” optimists hope will fill part of the void as newspapers retreat—announced their dissolution recent days. The new media model, it seems, is no more bulletproof than the old one.

There’s more to it than that, said Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend. The Pajamas Media project was an “attempt to institutionalize the wingnut blogosphere as an alternative to the perceived liberal MSM.” The American people are simply tired of that old George W. Bush conservatism, so nobody cared what these bloggers had to say.

That’s not true at all, said Allahpundit in Hot Air, a member of the Pajamas Media network. This system “kept a lot of right bloggers going during the election” by giving them a little ad money, but now circumstances have changed as the company pulls back to focus on PajamasTV. “Business is business.” But some of us—Hot Air included—have enough of an audience to do fine on our own.

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