General

AOL Playboy and Tommy Christopher Drama [UPDATE]

Did I hit all the key buzzwords in the title? I think so…

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying a self-imposed blog break to move on to other more important things in life, like sell the house, learn to play Bass guitar among other things.

I considered spilling what I knew about the political machine/AOL/politics daily fiasco, since many of my fellow bloggers and netizens would, I’m sure, find it quite interesting.

But that would require posting and since I was more than a little burnt out, I blew it off. In the meantime other political bloggers at AOL have been fired and now Tommy Christopher has as well.

This is quite shocking as Christopher while quite liberal, is also a good blogger and semi, if not fully, professional at it.

I don’t know what AOL was paying Tommy, but unless it was multiple powers of what they were paying me it was way, way too little for the value they were getting.

Let’s back up a bit. September 2006. Out of the blue, I get an email from a very nice lady at AOL who’s been following my Ohio political blogging and asked if I would like to do it for them and a little $$. Sure, I said, and so began a long and (for me) fruitful side job. I was one of many bloggers nationwide to be so picked.

Late in 2007 the AOL site is relaunched with a focus on presidential politics and a fraction of the bloggers were picked to come over and write for the new site. political machine. I was one of them. Why? I don’t know probably something about consistency, unique viewpoint and non-rabidity. But whatever.

The political machine did a decent job of covering the election and got many hits. I have no idea whether it made money, but I know I did and the checks all cashed so no complaints here anyway.

And then around January we started hearing rumblings about a new direction and site, we also got a new manager, coming over from Comedy Central, a Michael Kraskin. I’ll try to compress the timeline from here to relevant events to provide some context. We also find out that Melinda Henneberg has been hired to revamp the site.

February/March Email goes out saying we’re all going to be more professional, no personal attacks, journalism standards, no partisan unsupported POV. Must be analytical and objective. Fine I can work with that.

March: Kraskin starts busting my stuff for bad english, grammar, etc. I clean it up a little, and actually start proofreading. A little annoyed, because hey it’s blogging, but whatever, I can work with whatever standards are passed down.

April: Launch. We learn that full-timers are hired. Professional journalists, presumably with decent middle income salaries and benefits. About ten of them, including well-knowns such as Walter Shapiro and Carl Cannon, among others. new site is PoliticsDaily.com and aesthetically looks good. Material from full-timers is newspaper column quality.

Also April: oldtime bloggers (like me) are still posting, and trying to match quality with full-timers (albeit without the pay, but with day jobs). Amateur stuff rarely gets posted or fronted.

May 7th. I am fired. Reason: Cutbacks, we like your stuff Dave, just not working out.  I’m fine with it, but a little annoyed at the lying.  I mean really, cutbacks?  You just hire a bunch of full-timers and you’re worried about my $12/post.  Riiiggghhht.  No I’m sure among other reasons, they felt my stuff wasn’t up to snuff.  Note though that I was not replaced, not by any blogger for sure.

May, week later: Mark Impomeni is fired. Apparent reason (from what I know) a disagreement over content in a post.

So two conservative bloggers are fired.

The first week in June, one of the most prolific bloggers, Tommy Christopher is fired, as noted above. Reason, ostensibly the playboy thing.

Also, just learned via twitter that Caleb Howe is fired, another conservative blogger. By my count that’s three conservative bloggers and one liberal gone.

This smells like a purge to me. My hypothesis is that AOL is looking to fire all the bloggers and turn politicsdaily into a pure journalism and editorial shop. Why they don’t just go ahead and do so, I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader.

Whether an online website can actually support the salaries and benefits of 10-15 journalists is another huge question mark. Whatever it is, it’s not the highly successful Jason Calacanis model that AOL originally bought, and it’s not blogging.

It could be that Melinda Henneberger is trying to employ as many journalists as she can (note her background) and dumping the bloggers is just an unfortunate side effect.  If that’s the way they want to go, that’s their prerogative.  But it seems to me they’re doing it ham-handedly in a way guaranteed to generate a  high negative reaction from the blogosphere.

Unless they believe that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin

I certainly don’t agree with the left-leaning Christopher’s politics. But he showed guts blogging about the Playboy “hatef**k” list when few others on his side paid attention or cared. I think U.S. News should trade in tired old Bonnie Erbe and hire Tommy Christopher.

© 2009 NixGuy.com.