Back in 2001 when I started Right Wing News (which is now a vanity website after it went out of business at the start of the year), the media landscape was entirely different. The Internet advertising market was too soft to interest big corporations; social media was a non-factor and many of the biggest conservative websites today didn’t exist. What that meant was that if you were good, you could build an audience just doing 3-4 posts a day and you had a lot more fun doing it to boot. Back then, think tanks flew bloggers out to conferences; bloggers actually broke some big stories and we wrote about whatever we found interesting. It all went well enough for me that I was able to go full time in 2005. After a few years of that, things started to change for me and for other bloggers for two reasons.
