Even as many bloggers have moved into the professional media world, fewer independent blogs have been picked up wholesale by a larger media group. Andrew Sullivan moved his blog over to Time in early 2006, and years earlier, Mickey Kaus moved his Kausfiles over to Slate. But both are solo bloggers who had a pre-existing relationship with those publications.
Rarer still is for a group blog to be bought out — but this past month, that’s just what’s happened at RedState. If anything, that deal less resembles those mentioned above than the Washington Post’s acquisition of Slate from Microsoft two years ago.
In mid-December, the conservative community group site announced it had agreed to be purchased by Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, Regnery Publishing, Evans-Novak Political Report, the Conservative Book Club, among other movement conservative publishing enterprises.
RedState already had undergone several changes since its launch in 2004 as a 527, including a switch from RedState.org to RedState.com in 2005 to create a for-profit entity that could accept advertising. This was followed by a major redesign and relaunch in the middle of last year, whereupon founding director Erick Erickson was hired/stepped up to run the site full-time. Most of the ad revenue went to him, which was just enough to get by on. But it brought RedState to another crossroads: Paying Erickson stretched the site’s resources too thin to develop and expand the site further.
About a year ago the site’s directors — Erickson plus Clayton Wagar, Mike Krempasky and Ben Domenech — started looking ahead once again, this time with an eye toward a merger. They entertained offers from a few different entities — whose names, alas, I was not told — but questions lingered about whether those groups and individuals understood the site.
The first talks with Eagle, in late spring or early summer of 2006, started out no more serious than those with suitors who had come and gone. But that soon changed. Chiefly, Eagle promised to:
- Respect the brand and not change it fundamentally
- Invest in the property long-term, with an eye toward financial viability
- Keep Erickson and hire Wagar as a consultant to make sure of it
As Erickson told me: “They made it clear to us, we see you as your own brand.” And Eagle’s Group Publisher Stephen O’Connor confirmed, they didn’t “want to break something that’s fixed.”
The formal process began in mid-summer, and sometime in the fall an agreement was hammered out for an undisclosed sum. RedStaters themselves earned a share of the proceeds — and not just the site’s directors, either. About 20 contributors overall, including site co-founder and former director Josh Trevino, did as well. (Some were unable to accept the money on account of job-related ethical considerations.) “Nobody’s going to afford a Bentley,” said Domenech. More like “a few car payments.”
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So what will change? For one thing, Erickson now has a boss in Eagle’s e-business head, Stuart Richens. Upon the initial announcement, the plan was for Human Events online editor Robert Bluey to be a liaison between RedState and Eagle/Human Events — mostly to rope Erickson into their editorial meetings. However, as noted here recently, Bluey will soon depart for Heritage. Now Erickson will work directly with Richens, who like himself and Wagar, is based in Georgia.
Although Krempasky and Domenech retain no official oversight of the company, they will remain with Erickson and Wagar as directors — along with recently-elevated directors Jeff Emanuel and Thomas Crown — but only for making editorial board decisions, not running the business. Erickson wrote in a subsequent announcement, “In the past, we’ve used the terminology ‘Directors’ and we will probably continue to do so.” The titles will remain the same, though it won’t carry the same legal meaning.
When I spoke to principals from Eagle and RedState in mid-December, there were no existing plans for writers from the Human Events site to cross over to the other, but already that’s been the case: Human Events has a regular feature, “Today on RedState” which sends traffic in that direction, while Bluey had a post on RedState just yesterday.
Is there overlap between Human Events and RedState? Both sides believe there is not: While both are obviously online conservative group efforts, they see Human Events as news editorial content whereas RedState is user-generated. Eagle is a publishing house with different labels, and RedState would just be the newest addition.
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For a long time, RedState was thought of as Daily Kos for the right, in terms of being a community politics site, down to using the same content management system. And they too were conscious of this debt, although where dKos is a purely grassroots site, RedState aimed to be more tightly organized. Their mid-summer move from Scoop to Drupal could be seen as one step in that direction. However unintentional, their acquisition by Eagle seems to represent another.
Eagle assures me that RedState members will not start getting regular e-mails (if you’re on their list, they can send a lot) but their interest in RedState is related: RedState has a database of registered users, and they’re always picking up more.
Eagle’s business model is similar to other ideological publications with a limited, but highly self-selected subscriber base. That base of members (with contact information) is valuable, and candidates, campaigns and organizations will pay good money to rent them. Subscribe to the Washington Monthly, wait a few weeks, and in addition to each monthly issue you’ll get the occasional fundraising plea from the William J. Clinton Foundation. Likewise, Eagle rents its lists to such groups on the right, and with more than 20,000 open accounts at RedState, that’s not a bad place to start looking.
Based on their own data, RedState claims their readers skew “a good decade and a half younger” than those at Daily Kos, and certainly younger than those at FreeRepublic. Often ex-military, married with kids, RedState sees a traffic uptick after work hours, perhaps suggesting their readers include a large number who don’t sit in front of a computer all day. While online demographics are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, it seems plausible they have a unique political audience. On the other hand, if they are younger, they might not have quite as much money.
Yet now, Eagle’s resources enable RedState to do move in new directions. More than just a wannabe Daily Kos, by now it’s in a new category: a reciprocal relationship between new media and old. This kind of thing is not entirely new — AOL paid Jason Calacanis some $25 million for Weblogs, Inc., while the New York Times Co foolishly plopped down more than $400 million for About.com — but those have more in common with dot com-era gambles rather than synchronistic strategic acquirements.
Those companies just wanted ad revenue, but Eagle’s acquisition actually strengthens its brand — again, not unlike the Post and Slate. So if at some point in the future (let’s say) the New York Times Co. decides to buy Huffington Post, it will owe less to any success with About.com and more to deals like Eagle-RedState.
P.S. Human Events has found its new editor, replacing both now-at large Terry Jeffrey and Bluey in his online capacity: NRO contributor and Bush 41 dep. Undersec of Defense, Jed Babbin. U.S. News’ Washington Whispers whispers:
One of Babbin’s first tasks: Beef up the paper’s website and capitalize on Internet holdings like RedState.com.
Relatedly: Leaving 
