Rightie media enters its next phase

Very thought-provoking piece by Matt Lewis at The Week today.  Certainly got my attention, since this is the direction in which I want to steer my own writing career.

He does a good job of tracing conservative media's growth from the National Review / Human Events days through the rise of think tanks, talk radio, Fox News, and blogs.

He then discusses the emergence of an actual journalistic component to this development:

For a long time, the knock on conservative media was that there were too many opinion writers — too many of us trying to be the next William F. Buckley or George Will — and too few conservative-minded reporters like Bob Novak out pounding the pavement. That, too, has changed a lot in recent years. The Daily Caller (where I serve as a senior contributor) made major strides in terms of focusing on reporting guided by a conservative worldview — rather than straight up conservative opinionating — and serving an under-served niche of news-hungry conservative readers as a result. For example, while much of the liberal media thought the ousting of New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was last Wednesday's biggest story, The Daily Caller thought the Veterans Affairs scandal was, perhaps, one of the most important. And so on.

Conservative media has made great strides toward maturity. The Daily Caller, the Free Beacon,Breitbart — they're not merely about conservative opinion, but reported news informed by a conservative point of view. Simultaneously, a large Christian radio company called Salem Communications has, in recent years, acquired Townhall.com (where I formerly worked), Hot Air,Twitchy, Human Events (where I formerly blogged), and Red State. This consolidation will presumably lead to financial benefits involving economies of scale. So far, the new ownership has avoided messing up the good things about these sites, while presumably leveraging the power of negotiating advertising rates on a larger scale.

He says that the soon-to-be-launched digital news service of the Heritage Foundation marks another qualitative expansion of what rightie media is about, and then offers this observation:

 The center-right web market seems to be loosely divided between staid, august publications that provide important, if unsexy, content, and a new generation of irreverent sites which — living in a free market world — can sometimes err on the side of what Reid Cherlin describes as "The Huff-Po-ization of the right('come for the Obama bashing, stay for the busty slideshows and viral videos.')" Sites like The Federalist try to bridge the gap by providing serious commentary that is typically written by young, pop culture–savvy writers. It is unclear whether this is profitable.
And so, in an ironic turn of events, it could be that the real service Heritage might provide the conservative movement is to remove the free market risks (and Kate Upton slideshows) — and subsidize serious, straight reporting — coupled with commentary and opinion from Heritage's respected scholars — all financed via conservative philanthropy.
But for this to work, Heritage will have to build a firewall, giving the news folks carte blanche authority to report the news as they see fit. Can an organization headed by Jim DeMint — with an activist arm (HeritageAction) that helped force a shutdown over defunding ObamaCare — also be able to run a fair, objective news outlet?
I certainly hope so. After all, it's incredibly important to have more and more conservative news outlets — not just one or two token conservative opinion writers at every major newspaper that otherwise leans left. We need actual news outfits staffed by actual reporters who just so happen to be conservative.

 

He then has some observations about the ease with which lefties can move from overtly ideological gigs to mainstream positions relative to right-leaning scribes.

For me, the constant proliferation of new modes of dissemination is the challenge.  I know how to observe the world and stack up current events against a set of principles I know to be true, good and right.  Finding the most effective way of sharing those observations sometimes seems like an elusive goal, just out of reach, much like the plight of the lover in Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn.