In our virtual newsroom on Slack, one of my colleagues, Jennifer Rust, recently used the term “pirate ship” to describe this band of writers and editors at PJ Media. The term couldn’t be more apt. The atmosphere across the site feels very much like a pirate ship, where we seek to plunder the hopes and dreams of wokies everywhere.
With that in mind, today marks a notable date on the calendar for me. It’s exactly one year to the day since I started writing for PJ Media. My first piece, Does Canada Really Want to Kill Babies Outside the Womb?, was a chance for me to get a feel for the rhythm and pace of writing for you, while working to get a sense of what you want to see.
Since then, I’ve written 506 articles, and thanks to the longstanding popularity and growth of this site, I have been amazed at how many of you have read the articles I’ve written and responded the way you’ve done. If you’d told me this a year ago, I’d have been overwhelmed, intimidated, and skeptical of such a prediction.
Before I started writing for PJ Media, like you, I was an avid reader of the site. The Morning Briefing was part of my daily routine, and so was the evening email. I’ve always enjoyed — and still do — reading what PJ Media writers come up with.
As a writer who wrote less frequently for other conservative sites, my biggest question at the outset was whether or not I had the “writing muscles” it takes to contribute at a consistent pace to this site, which churns out high-level content 24/7. Initially, I thought that if I could turn out two to three articles per week, that would be an accomplishment.
Then something tragic happened. Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025, two days after I started. As PJ Media and other Townhall sites responded to the event and reported on it from every conceivable angle, I thought at first that there was no way I had anything to add. Then something clicked, driven by the personal impact Charlie’s assassination had on me.
I realized I actually did have something to say, and in fact, I had more than one thing to say. I had this nagging sense in the hours after Charlie’s death that he would now become a martyr for the cause, and so I wrote this: Unfinished Business: The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. And you responded to it.
And so, I started to write for you a bit more about the impacts and ramifications of the assassination, along with other things. I’d read your comments — every single one of them — at the bottom of the articles where our VIP members have the opportunity to engage. Sometimes I responded directly in those threads, but other times the feedback just fed this never-ending hum in the back of my mind, always keeping me thinking of you and what we need to talk about next. My pace of writing, barring vacations and other day-to-day work responsibilities, has continued at a good clip ever since.
I quickly realized that my role here isn’t the same as it might be at some other news site where writers take assignments from editors and then turn them in on deadline, almost transactionally. Instead, in real time, I developed a sense of community with you and a sense that we are having a never-ending conversation, punctuated by the articles I send your way most days.
This may be a little inside-baseball, but there are some things I think you should know. The culture here between the editors and the writers is unlike any I’ve seen before. Editors don’t just assign us stories to write and then sit back and wait. Writers are given a tremendous amount of latitude at every step in the process, from story selection to the headlines and photos you see to the direction of the stories themselves. The hardworking and patient editors put up with a lot, and they put in the long hours to keep the words flowing from us to you no matter what time of day or day of the week. Most importantly, they make sure it’s all up to the PJ Media standard. This is truly a collaborative environment in the very best sense of the word.
As for you, I love reading your comments, and I really don’t mind the negative ones. Thanks to the day job I’ve had over the years, I’ve got thick skin. I almost never take negative feedback personally, and instead see it as a guardrail most of the time. Other times, the negative feedback comes from wokies or paid trolls who monitor and post on our discussion boards to try to demoralize us. When they attack, it tells me I’m over the target. It tells me who I need to tick off in order to create the kind of work I came here to do.
Over the course of the past year, I’ve been amazed at the quality of our readers. You are CEOs, doctors, lawyers, engineers, fellow communicators, active and retired journalists, skilled tradespeople, laborers, public servants, military members (active duty and retired), clergy, teachers, first responders, and more than a few of you are women and men who made the decision to stay at home to raise your kids yourselves. Many of you school your kids yourselves as well. Almost all of you are smart, curious, and, from what I can tell, very committed to conservatism.
Too many of you are not Steelers fans, but I can deal with that. I’m a professional.
I’ve also noticed that influential people in their own right follow PJ Media: podcasters, radio hosts, TV hosts and their researchers and producers; politicians and their teams; and others.
Related for VIP Members: My Path to Conservatism Is Probably Nothing Like Yours but Still Exactly the Same
One Sunday morning, I wrote this piece about Tony Dungy, which he read before giving me some very positive feedback: Tony Dungy: A Life of Faith, Football, and Truth. The same thing happened with the late Scott Adams when he read this piece I wrote: While Men Wonder, 'What Can I Do?' They Already Know.
After Ted Turner died in May, I wrote a piece about him to mixed feedback among our readership, given his liberal bona fides. That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the positive and insightful feedback I got from a couple of our readers who are conservatives and who actually knew and worked with Turner very closely.
Then there was the piece I wrote in January that created a stir in some circles in my own backyard: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Anatomy of the Death of a Daily Newspaper. In this one, I wrote what I believed about the demise of daily newspapers. Since I called out my hometown paper, I figured I’d strike a nerve or two here. Someone in Las Vegas discovered it first, and then it was circulated almost like digital contraband among current and former Post-Gazette staffers in Pittsburgh and points unknown. It generated a lot of whispering among journos who I had thought were libs, only to find out who some of the secret conservatives were in that newsroom. Some reached out to me after they read this piece.
To be sure, you never know who’s reading us, but I can confirm that we are not preaching to the choir.
After a year of writing for you, it still feels to me like we’re just getting started. Let’s keep this conversation going. As we say here on this little pirate ship of ours, “Set sail! Arrr!”
