Pajamas Media touted as citizen journalist and a blogger alternative to traditional media, infused with cash from angel investors is about to lose many of it’s first sign up bloggers who had 18 month contracts, such as LaShawn Barber - PJM ads are no longer on her blog, She states she is shutting down to start a more personal blog. LaShawn found infamy in stating others were just jealous of the money she received from signing with PJM among other things; and Laurence Simon who figured out very early on Roger Simon and Charles Johnson didn’t have a clue how to set Pajamas Media up, run it, promote it or use the money they were handed wisely.

Dennis The Peasant (Ohio CPA) was in on the initial planning stages of PJM, and got royally shoved aside. He got some great inside information along with a few other bloggers. His posts are a fascinating read on what not to be and how not to act, this was a vanity  project from day one.

Laurence:

You will probably notice an improvement in load time on this site because I am now removing all of my remaining Pajamas Media ad banners.

I have yet to receive my final check from them.

Whether this means that they are short of cash, careless in their accounting, or a victim of the stellar performance of our Postal Service, I have no idea.

And I don’t care. For all it matters, they can spend the remaining balance on condoms with which to screw themselves.

What was promoted as an attempt to empower bloggers became an exercise in further empowering only the already-powerful bloggers and adding noise to an already-saturated echo-chamber.

Back when it started, my attempt to provide a platform for the Pajamas Bloggers (the forums) was met with scorn, ridicule, or disdain by the PJM elite, and when it was time to select a “blogger relations” blogger, they decided to stile communications further by adding an incompetent part-timer as their gatekeeper.

The sense of community was zero. Heck, less than zero because smaller fringe bloggers such as myself were left out of the mutual-admiration circle among the upper-tier bloggers, seen only as “life support for ad banners” feeding the core site or the “popular” blogs.

Forget Pajamas Media or OSM or Jellyfish as names. It’s really High School Media or Clique Media.

Steve, Moxie, and Dennis - you were right. You were right.

However, I’d still like to thank Roger, Charles, Glenn, LaShawn, and all the others providing the heels that ground my enthusiasm for blogging into dust. Without your suppression, I would not have sought out other outlets for expression and creativity, such as podcasting and gardening and building within Second Life.

Yeah, I’ve encountered cliques and such within those platforms, too. But unlike the blogging social stratification that Pajamas Media has sought to reinforce for profit’s sake, podcasting and SL are still relatively young and there’s still a chance for enthusiastic, energetic and creative types to be judged on their skills and achievements and not on past accolades and “who you know.”