After Pam Spaulding told her readers that she was super-tired and might have to shut down Pam’s House Blend on account of said burnout, she was approached by blogger Teddy Partridge about moving PHB to Firedoglake, a progressive group blog for whom he writes about LGBT issues. After confirming that she’d get to keep editorial control, keep her contributors and retain the archives, she signed on.
From The Advocate:
Spaulding said that due to time constraints and growth of the blog, moving the operations to FireDogLake will make it easier for her and her team to cover more news, including the upcoming 2012 election cycle. She also said that the move will encourage more voices in discussions over LGBT topics.
“The opportunity to bring new readership to the Blend (more non-LGBT progressive voices) into the debate on equality is also a big positive for the Blend, so I thank Jane for the chance to expand PHB readership,” she wrote.
Jane Hamsher, founder of FireDogLake, says:
“[It] gives me great pleasure to announce that Pam’s House Blend will be joining the FireDogLake family of blogs. I think it’s a perfect union — as the task of hosting a blog and performing the tech, legal and security work to keep it up and running becomes more and more complex and expensive, it will free Pam and her fellow bloggers to spend their time doing what they do best, which is blog. It also allows us to feature the work of a really amazing group of writers on FDL, and be tremendously enriched by the PHB community.”
Hamsher’s a pretty well-known progressive voice — she’s written for The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, appeared on CNN, MSNBC, The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS, Al Jazeera and BBC and also produced films including “Natural Born Killers” and “Permanent Midnight.”
Firedoglake describes itself as:
Firedoglake is an online news site featuring original reporting and commentary including the FDL News Desk, FDL Action, Emptywheel, TBogg, MyFDL and La Figa. The FDL Book Salon also features online discussion with book authors every Saturday and Sunday at 5pm ET.
This is an interesting move — although queer blogs have often become part of larger gay-focused corporations (AfterEllen + AfterElton –> Logo, Queerty –> GayCities, Curve –> Avalon Media), as far as I know this is the first time a gay blog has become part of a not-gay blog.
It’s clearly a move which means that gay rights are very important to political progressives and everyone overall loves gay people. Especially lesbians like Pam Spaulding who are actual lesbians and not men.
Pam is awesome. I agree, seems good.
If you read her articles like most LGBTQ blogs, there’s a lot of “you already know this” implied in the blogs. So I guess there’s gonna have to be like an ongoing glossary or just crap tons of hyperlinks. Or different writing style altogether. Perhaps not? Will be interesting to see.
I’m always a bit dismayed by the amount of comments on her blog, so wider audience ftw. She’s very well versed in many aspects of LBGTQ issues, so—thumbs up!
You know, this is starting to look like a June trend. Another blog I follow (non-LGBT) was also having sustainability issues, so it announced it was entering into collaboration with Patheos.
One of the problems with associating one’s blog community with a larger web org, though, is that there’s often a community shuffling at the beginning when readers leave or become otherwise upset or miss the moving memo and can’t figure out what happened for a few weeks/months. I hope Pam’s House Blend stays strong during the transition.
Was that other blog The Wild Hunt? Because I’m a little dismayed as I’ve heard some chatter (here is the only one I can remember off the top of my head) about Patheos using blogs like that to generate page hits (and therefore money), while being openly hostile to us (Pagans, gays, people of color, etc) as people.
I’m just kind of concerned overall with the sustainability of awesomeness like The Wild Hunt and Pam’s House Blend and Autostraddle as independent content providers. It’ll be interesting to see how Pam’s and The Wild Hunt do in relation to their new homes. Maybe it’ll just be a matter of finding a sufficiently progressive larger web org that makes a difference for sites that would otherwise have had to close.
Yes, it was The Wild Hunt, and I also read Cat Valente’s post a while ago — so needless to say, the news disturbed me.
Well, if Spaulding has found a way to continue blogging, that’s good I guess. The problem is Firedoglake is really triesomely, relentlessly, borderline insanely anti-Obama. They lost their damn minds back during the election, aligning themselves with the most irrational “Hilary Clinton or nothing” PUMA types and haven’t looked back since. As we get closer to election season, I expect to see ever increasing amounts of stuff like this, posted Friday:
“No President with Obama’s record or failure and betrayal should be rewarded with another term. And if we have to put up with a moral chameleon like Mitt Romney, indistinguishable from Obama, in order to demolish Obamism and what it has done to a once proud Democratic Party, then so be it.”
…well there goes my happy feelings.
x2
x3
Yeah, I poked around their site for a few hours after this was posted and—ehhhhhh :/ (had never heard of them before, but have known Pam’s blog a fair while)
Then again, maybe that’s a good place to have someone like Pam? Or a good place for her to have a bad experience and never want to blog again :( I wouldn’t let the anti Obama thing kill any happy feelings. I mean, sad yes, but at least she would be a voice of difference within their network—possibly—maybe?
Mixed feelings.
(how about Pam’s Autostraddle house blend?)
I dunno—I’m starting to feel a “The awesome little independent coffee shop around the corner just turned into a Starbucks” feeling. (not that I don’t ever go to Starbucks—just sayin’. Not the same vibe)
But—I guess it’s her blog, her call. I’m sure she’s more than familiar with the content of Firedoglake.
Well, Pam still has editorial control. So I don’t imagine their content will change at all. I’m just glad for it to exist in any permutation b/c I read it more or less every day.
Truth
(permutation)