Proceed Calmly to the Nearest Exit
May 17, 2006
A confession. I don’t own an iPod or any other kind of MP3 player. Clearly, the whole music download business has been doing fine without me. But I have been interested in podcasts, so I decided to download iTunes and start playing around.
This led me to the Podcast directory on Apple’s Music Store. There, among the “New and Notable” podcasts was “Pajamas Media: Blog Week in Review”—thirty minute hairballs featuring the likes of Glenn Reynolds and Tammy Bruce.
I have stayed away from the political blogs, which only make my blood boil. Pajamas Media was coming into being as I was signing off from political blogging. I looked at it once, and fell asleep. As James Wolcott has said, the site is the Web’s first Edsel, and that is being really, really kind. So, faced with the prospect of listening to these Karl Rove automotons prattle on, I decided to do something much more interesting and productive and got my teeth cleaned.
I mention all this not to lapse back into the political realm—not going there—but to observe that the new media technologies allow anyone to publish anything, anytime. Sometimes this is a good thing—indeed it can be a great thing—but sometimes it means wading through the dross to find something good.
UPDATE: Those Pajamas Media investors can’t be very happy. More thoughts on that here.
The politics of the various sites aside, the difference in popularity is simple to explain. The writing on the Huffington Post is simply better. Most of the Pajamas Media authors are mediocre at best, and some of them are really dreadful (check out this bizarro one for an example). A worthwhile publishing project starts with good writing, if you ask me. This is why Slate has done well. The writing is uniformly very good and often excellent. Maybe they use editors. Maybe their investors had a clue.
Posted by Bill Trippe at May 17, 2006 4:57 PM
