I was an early convert to the Pajamas Media fold, but not without some effort. In the spring of 2005, I had my blog going (it was nearly four years old, which seemed ancient), a fairly lucrative deal with Henry Copeland’s BlogAds, and a rewarding sense of independence. So when Roger Simon and Charles Johnson called to suggest that I become part of some newfangled blog-network kind of thing, I was receptive, but I didn’t exactly leap at the opportunity right away. It took several more months, and many more phone calls, before I finally signed on.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry about my independence. From the first, somewhat bumpy launch as OSM (for “Open Source Media,” a name that, despite a search by trademark lawyers, turned out to have been taken) to today, when Pajamas Media is beating out many older and better-publicized sites for traffic and links, it’s just been blogging as usual, with the exception that Ed Driscoll will sometimes fix my typos if I’m offline for a while.
Pajamas Media did help with my multimedia projects, like the late, lamented Glenn & Helen Show podcast, and then, with the birth of Pajamas TV, with various video reports. I still shoot video myself, guerrilla-style, sometimes, as at the Harvard Law School constitutional convention conference last month, but now things are more professionally produced and edited sometimes and I’ve learned that it can be fun working with a team, as well as on your own. In fact, one of the things I’ve liked most about the whole Pajamas experience is having a team behind me when I want one, and being independent when I don’t.
Pajamas TV sounded a little too Hefneresque (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so it quickly became PJTV, and now Pajamas Media is being “rebranded” as PJ Media. Well, people have been calling us “PJM” for short for a while already, so it’s not a big change and maybe we should have just gone all the way to three-letter nomenclature like the old networks. But whatever you call us, we’ll still be here, still doing what those old networks, and newspapers, don’t do.
Because where else will you find Spengler, Victor Davis Hanson, Richard Fernandez, Ed Driscoll and Michael Totten all side by side? Nowhere else!
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