This is an excellent point:
I couldn’t agree more. I find it particularly depressing that even aggregators like Insty link mostly to these places — and I understand that Insty was the actual founding blogfather to the original PJMedia (Pajamas Media) so his loyalty and ties thereto are perfectly understandable.
But that whole media conglomerate known as
may be starting to get up my nose.
Apart from anything else, they’re an incestuous little bunch, journalistically speaking, and cover the same news items as each other, swapping columnists and opinions like it’s some 1970s suburban Connecticut key party.
I’m not suggesting that they merge into some ur-Fox News organization because that really would be a dangerous single point of failure. And yes, I understand that writers need to be paid, reporters’ expenses reimbursed, bandwidth costs covered and so on.
TANSTAAFL, and we conservatives are not freeloaders — except that when our exposure to news is slowly disappearing into the coils of a paywall python, that is not a healthy thing.
Right now, conservative media is tiptoeing along the tightrope that many mainstream news outlets are, trying to strike some kind of balance by making some articles free while lodging others behind a paywall.
That’s fine; but of late, if I find that a particular news item seems to be worth my reading but it’s behind a paywall — any paywall — I then just resort to searching for an outlet that carries it without that restriction, or getting access to an Internet archive. And I’m usually successful.
That’s not true of the commentary / editorials at all, because I’m perfectly capable of forming my own ideas on a topic; so any paywalled opinion piece (e.g. Vodkapundit) is simply ignored. (And Stephen and I go back many, many years together, so it really pains me to have to say this.) It’s especially true when I know that my own opinion is likely to parallel or coincide with that of the author, because then I’d simply be paying for something akin to my own thoughts. That’s just silly.
I’d get a Twatter account, only I don’t need to be exposed to the madness of crowds.
I don’t even mind advertisements, as long as they’re passive (like the old newpaper/magazine type) and don’t pop up shouting at me or linking me to their buy-me website (and thereby having me become part of their consumer giga-database exploitation schemes). Fuck that for a tale.
I don’t have a solution to all of this, other than to suggest that appealing for the occasional donation (in place of drip-drip-drip bank account bloodletting subscriptions) might be a better approach. Given my age and therefore precarious financial state, any subscription is a non-starter.
But I absolutely share Mr. George MF Washington’s opinion, so I think the Big Conservative Brains* need to figure it out.
*you can quit that derisive laughter, now.