Pajamas Media, the company that announced that it was going to revolutionize some aspects of the Internet in terms of bringing various bloggers together, offering a new advertising package, and earning bloggers more $$$$ for their mostly freebie writings, did some soul-searching on Thanksgiving Day.
It came in the form of this “blogjam” discussion on where the concept is and how it can improve. The participants: members of the PJ editorial board.
Today’s panelists, all members of Pajamas Media’s Editorial Advisory Board, will be carving up the turkey that was OSM (Open Source Media) and has now been reborn as Pajamas Media. What is our new identity, and what does it mean for us moving forward?
Read it yourself and make your own judgments. Our initial view is that the group again makes a mistake by limiting this soul-searching to its big-name elites versus the other bloggers who signed on.
Jeff Jarvis has an even stronger reaction here. Read it all yourself, but here’s a small portion:
Well Pajamas Media, nee OSM, nee Open Source Media, nee Pajamas Media is trying to do some navel-gazing on Thanksgiving and one thing becomes painfully, loudly, self-apparently apparent: They have no idea what they want to be or why they exist. Which is what I’ve said from the start. Really: Just read the closed-loop discussion among only the PM people — no outsiders allowed, no comments allowed….
…Here’s the challenge, folks: Stand back and see whether you can agree on just one thing. Finish this sentence in no more than 10 words: Pajamas Media is _________________.
Jarvis says all other discussions are meaningless until this can be answered.
And, indeed, if PJ flops it’ll be because it was WAY over-hyped. There were national news stories, hundreds of weblog posts, about how it was going to be a revolutionary concept that would take blogging to a higher level — where it would compete with (and some suggested would even show up) the mainstream media and make blogging profitable (which it isn’t for most people who do it).
In the end, internal dynamics resulted in the group insulting many bloggers from varying viewpoints who felt left out and rejected and you can’t look at what has emerged and feel it is anything more than this: one more new blog. Nothing more. Nothing revolutionary. It IS worth blogrolling (we put it under Other Voices on the right of this page).
But a new era?
Right now it’s as revolutionary to blogging and media as Costco coming out with a new frozen pizza would be to frozen pizza.