…not for your attention to this matter, although that too, but rather for your continued readership of Power Line. We have implemented changes to create a subscription package that we thought some readers would find of value and would serve the best interests of the site. This is a progress report.
We are a conservative site. We understand that some readers wanted things to continue as they were and we respect that. We have attempted to minimize the changes. As of today, through the continued efforts of our publisher, I believe that up to 500 comments will be visible to all readers on each post and images posted in comments should be accessible without the necessity of a click.
When John invited me to join him on Power Line over Memorial Day weekend in 2002, he was more optimistic about our attracting readers for our work than I was. We had been writing together for nearly ten years on the side of our law practices and experienced the fulfillment of seeing our extracurricular thoughts in print. Within a month or two of cranking up the site we had perhaps 300 readers a day.
I was ecstatic that a few readers had found us and continued to seek us out every day. It was all I needed to get me out of bed early to work on the site before I left for my job in the legal department as regional counsel for TCF Financial Corp. Over time our readership continued to grow.
Our work on the site was sufficient to have garnered an invitation from the Republican National Committee to cover the 2004 convention in Madison Square Garden with the mainstream press. We knew our readership was of high quality and thought we had a good thing going.
At the time of Rathergate in September 2004, we had approximately 3,000 daily readers and no comments. None. Zero. And yet we broke the Rathergate story with the help of knowledgeable readers communicating with us by email and, by mid-morning, fellow “bloggers” who contributed to the story. Working for the Drudge Report at the time, the great Andrew Breitbart was one of our readers, or so we discovered.
We have considerably more readers than that today and have found no visible fall-off since implementing the changes John announced last week. It’s obviously too soon to arrive at a definitive assessment, but we thank those of you who have stuck with us. We intend to do our best to continue to make it worth your while as readers and/or subscribers.
