Least Loved Bedtime Stories v. 2.0

Okay. I’ve been thinking about the Blog “Venture” Formerly Known As Pajamas Media for quite some time now. Never mind that I still can’t figure out just what is supposed to make this thing stand out from all the other multiple-blog-linking things* out there; i.e., what exactly justifies all the hype and cash outlay, not to mention the Big Opening Bash to which some people came from the other side of the globe. I certainly hope that what they are trying to do (whatever that is) at least makes enough money so people can recoup their expenses for this party. (And I’m not just saying that because I’d rather Tim Blair had donated the price of the Sydney-to-New-York ticket to my Paypal so I could buy my long-coveted dream laptop** rather than spend it on what sounds like a rather disappointing event. I do think that if this effort fizzles someone who endured a 22-hour plane flight both ways is going to be a tad upset.)

I can’t help thinking that Steve H.’s harsh criticism is right: the OSM people seem to have forgotten certain essential details in their impatience to get going. Here is a short list of some of the things that just plain look bad:

• The domain-name registration fiasco.
• The business name registration fiasco.
• The overly-intricate legal document sendout before they had even so much as bought up webspace fiasco.
• The weakness-revealing sensitivity to criticism.

Full disclosure: I was invited to join Pajamas Media as a something (I doubt as a member of the “editorial board” or whatever — it’s been a while, and the email is buried deep in my overloaded inbox), and downloaded that huge and (to me) incomprehensible legal document pdf. At the time I just thought “nah, looks too complicated for me, and besides, it looks like work.” Also I am leery of signing documents I don’t understand that aren’t for tangible things like cars and student loans. (I should have been leery about those too. Oh well…) I wasn’t into the advertising game anyway (as you can see I have changed my mind a bit about that). Also, I am too darn lazy — I got the feeling that if I signed on I’d be obligated to post regularly; I couldn’t slack off like I’ve been doing. I don’t really agree with the idea that all blogs are made by “citizen journalists,” if by “journalists” the term “reporters” is actually meant. I’d make a lousy reporter. For one thing, I’m not all that observant; if I tried to actually report on something I know I’d miss all sorts of important details. For another thing, reporting is, or it should, take a bit of effort — especially the sort of reporting the people involved in this venture seem to want bloggers to do: mainstream press-rivalling investigative reporting, aka, “telling the truth the MSM won’t tell anymore because they are too biased.” I’m willing to believe that many professional news organs are biased up the yin-yang; for instance, a certain “paper of record” seems to look at everything through Westernculturesucks glasses so that reading many of its articles is about as pleasurable as chewing on iron filings.

That being said, I don’t really know a whole lot about professional news journalism. I leave that to experts like Tim, who, I hope, will get something from this other than an airplane sinus headache. I don’t know much about what it takes to start up a business, though I have been told that new businesses should pick a name that is not too quirky, so that the mythical timid middle-American customer won’t be frightened away by weirdness (and more likely, so that the name won’t be too memorable in case the business feature fails), so I guess that’s why they chose the bland, dull name “Open Source Media” to replace the more interesting — and pertinent — “Pajamas Media.” But it’s all so stupid, because as JohnnyMC points out, the term “open source” is all over the internet and has been for years, and is usually identified with software, not “free speech.” All this name will prompt is confusion (people coming to the site by the so-called “word of mouth” looking for free software will be pissed, and boy can free software hounds get pissed off if they don’t get what they want), and possibly lawsuits if the unlikely happens and the venture is successful. Why, when they found out that it was too late to register the domain name “Pajamas Media” couldn’t they have changed it to “pjm.com” or “pyjamasmedia.us” or “peejays.org” or “footiepajamas.ws” or anything else but the too-much-like-MSM “osm.org”?

And forget the domain name — did no one tell them that registering a domain name and a business name are two different processes? Doesn’t look like it, or if anyone did, this advice was not heeded. Now they are stuck with “Open Source Media.” Yawnnnnn….

Another thing is, the fact that they have chose to start out with such extravagant fanfare — big bashes in NYC with people flying in from everywhere as if this were the Oscars — only makes them look even more like the infamous dot.com startups of the 90s. Can you say “web portals”? Can you say “push media”? Can you say “channels”? Can you say “whatever happened to all of that”? Can you say “they vanished like a blogger’s dream of getting Bill Clinton to shut up”? I knew you could.

And last but not least: the fact that some of the founders have displayed a rather thin-skinned attitude toward criticism doesn’t bode well for the venture. Granted, a lot of the “criticism” is in fact cheap shots — I think Ann Althouse’s semen/pus “joke” was disgusting**, and rather shocking coming from her — but the general attitude seems to be anger that not everyone is praising OSM to the skies.

I think that one of the things that this dustup reveals is that despite the criticism of Jeff Jarvis’ commenters there are actually very few true conservatives among the “big blog names” that are involved in this stunt. Most of these people are actually socially fairly liberal; they merely recognize that liberalism is a product of Western Civilization instead of antithetical to it, and also like every other normal liberal (as opposed to freakish leftist moonbats) they don’t want to hand over their countries to fanatical Muslim terrorists in the name of “multicultural tolerance.” They also all seem to mainly be involved in either the arts, journalism, law — where are the actual business-heads? Business is where the most conservative people tend to flock; a true conservative is supposed to have some business acumen (as the stereotype goes, anyway); he would at least know that you don’t throw a business bash like it’s 1999 when you haven’t even made your first real dollar yet.****

*Okay, Breitbart.com seems to be more of a “news bloggers would be interested in” aggregator type of thing. I dunno, he never seems to have anything I’m interested in. But I’m not really a blogger, this is just a clever disguise.

**I mean, if he was going to just waste it, he coulda wasted it on me! What can I say, I can’t think of any reason to get on a plane, much less a web-venture startup party. Of course, what I’m really mad about is he came all the way here and does he take a detour down to Florida? No! And we’re having lovely weather! We could’ve gone to Gatorland!

***I must say that, despite her general tone — a bit uncharacteristically bitchy — I tend to agree with all her other posts on this subject. There are a lot of them so that’s the link to her main site, just scroll down.

Update: ah! I forgot one more thing. Are these people nuts, scheduling a thing like this so close to the horrordays- I mean holidays? I sure hope people who flew in from out of town are getting out of there now, because if they aren’t, they’ll be stuck in New York until next year.

****Editing update: I decided to edit this somewhat to remove names, because I’m not singling any particular person out here. Especially a lot of people who just got on board as contributors or editors; I doubt any of the mistakes and missteps are their fault.

I also want to add something I forgot about: the complaints I’ve read about OSM.org’s site design. Personally I think the site itself looks just fine — it’s clean and readable, and I like the top section with the “next, previous” links. The design could use a bit of color, though; right now it’s a bit too bland and characterless. The excess of white, along with the omnipresent “O,” just makes me think of the Overstock.com commercials. And I don’t like the logo: it’s boring, doesn’t really make anyone think of writing or blogging or news, and it looks a little too much like a representation of something swirling down the toilet. I’m not saying that to snark — that’s simply the first thing that came to mind when I saw it. I’m not that original a thinker, so I’ll bet I’m not the only one who thought that.

Last update I swear Update: it looks like they did actually buy the pajamasmedia.com domain name. So I guess it was the business name that had already been registered… argh, this is making my head hurt. When I google “pajamas media” I get nothing but links to this thing and stories about this thing; I don’t get some other, unrelated business site. They should have stuck with the pajamas theme.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2005 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Itch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.