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.
Shut em down. I don’t care. Maybe the rest of us would be better off if they did all shut down.
All news now is attacks on our sensibilities, and downers to the max. Do I need to be constantly reminded of the doings of the criminal class no matter their place on the ladder?
With the amount of fakeness, lies, and mystery, combined with the AI nonsense it’s just becoming a blurry bore. 2026 may be the year I let it all go, as much as I can.
Kim, you could always come to Ace’s place. You’re known there, thanks to Jim SND. Of course, JJ and the others do link to the usual suspects as well.
> I don’t have a solution to all of this,
The main problem is that there are a couple sites–yours, Instapundit, a few others–that I read daily (mostly through RSS), and a bunch of other sites that I read *an* article on once a month.
So I’m not spending 4 to 10 dollars a month for a dozen sites that get linked to one article once a week.
I image that there’s a bunch of people out there like this.
The solution is “micropayments”. A system where you pay a per-article charge to read an article. You give a micropayment vendor say 10 bucks, and then each article you read gets from 1/10th of a cent to 20 cents. Lots of other details and possibilities that get swept under the rug.
But yeah, there’s at least one solution.
Aside from your page Kim, I read American Thinker and Townhall from time to time and Ammoland more regularly. I’d like to find more firearm related blogs to read. I find that more interesting
Even when one of conservative networks had a 50-60% off sale, I still couldn’t reach for my wallet. A magazine subscription used to cost $25-35 a year. I forget if that was the Daily Wire or some other outlet. I’m not paying more than that for access to an internet site or a streaming broadcast.
The various conservative sites struggle to find a sustainable business model. I think the key problem is that most conservatives are entitled skinflints who imagine that they deserve to have these services for free. I see people complaining about paywalled content that far exceeds the content of old fashioned print magazines and is offered for far less than what what those old magazines charged in constant dollars. What is available today is far greater than what could be gotten in the past even by spending large sums of money to subscribe to multiple newspapers and magazines. My guess is that many of these whiners are people who got those newspapers and magazines as perks of their high status employment and never had any idea what such things actually cost.