KAUSFILES SELLS OUT — an InstaPundit exclusive! Mickey Kaus has inked an awe-inspiring and deeply lucrative deal with Slate to take his blog “indoors.” Out of the blogosphere, into the lucrasphere! Mickey responds here to important questions:
Why are you selling out to a giant soulless monopolistic corporation?
I’m not selling. I’m renting! I can leave anytime I want, and take kausfiles with me. And they can cancel me anytime they want. They’re willing to be extremely flexible and play it by ear, which is one of the great virtues of Slate.
If I were a total schmuck, which I hope I’m not, I could even stay on Slate for a few months, get some new readers, and then move the blog somewhere else. You could move the site around like one of those disco events that’s held at a different venue each week.
Readers will never have to worry which site I’m on. If they type in www.kausfiles.com they’ll always be automatically taken to wherever the blog is.
But I think and hope it will find a happy home on Slate. I’ve been writing longer items for them for years, as you know. The Slate people are all friends, and Slate is looking very lively these days, you may have noticed. (No thanks to me) . They don’t tell me what to write, or what not to write, yet they give me ideas I can steal. And they have three frigging million readers!
What about quirkiness?
Quirk-retention is a major corporate objective of both partners in this joint venture. If the quirkiness level falls, it will almost certainly be my fault, not theirs I note that there are now quirky pages on the sites of other big corporations – ABC’s excellent The Note, for example, or MSNBC’s excellent gossipy email dispatches from Jeannette Walls. Maybe “suits” and “bean counters” will eventually stamp out these signs of life. But why? They’re popular — and it costs corporations money to ride herd on things. It may be cheaper just to let ‘em ride (at least as long as they don’t libel somebody or rile up some anti-smut group).
Why’d you do it?
There are only so many glamorous blogger parties you can attend before you ask yourself, ‘Is this all there is?” What about — I’d ask this to myself when I was alone, in the middle of the night – what about making some money and using it to buy consumer goods?
I will get a bit more money from Slate. I’ll also get more readers, if it goes as planned. I couldn’t think of any better way to get either of those things.
I also owed it to Slate. I was spending more and more time writing for the blog – because it was fun, in large part — but I was producing fewer and fewer of the longer pieces to sell to them. These longer pieces had occasionally been collections of shorter items – but now the shorter items all go into the blog, so the longer pieces were getting longer, and less frequent. This solves that problem. Now they get the longer pieces and the blog too. It’s all on Slate.
Blogs are hot right now – a good time to sell out! But will there be any site of yours that’s independent of Slate?
www.mickeykaus.com will soon have archives and links. And all existing kausfiles archives will stay where they are. But that’s about it.
When is this sellout going to happen?
Sometime this week, I hope. Maybe even tomorrow.
In the interest of journalistic ethics [Yeah, like you believe in those — Ed. Stop that! That’s Kaus’s schtick!] I should point out that the Q&A above is not an actual interview by me, but just a bunch of Q&A stuff that Mickey emailed me. (Hey, I wonder if other “journalistic” interviews ever work that way, only without admitting it? Naah, couldn’t be, that would be unethical.) Anyway, I thought people would be interested, though since you don’t have to do anything different, you can just relax and wait for the thrill.
Is this the future of blogging? Maybe in a small way. Would I do this? Probably not — er, unless the money was really good and they let me keep doing what I’m doing now. But unlike Mickey, I don’t have to support myself this way, either!