TheConservatives.com, the Washington Times Web project that was billed as an ambitious “multiplatform” venture to allow “the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers, like Newt Gingrich,” has gone silent.
Brian Faughnan, editor of the site, tells us the Times has officially canceled the project.
The site, rolled out in September, is no longer loading. Its Facebook page stopped updating the morning of Dec 23, as did the site’s Twitter feed (“House Blue Dog: We’ll Cave on Health Care, Too #tcot #right”).
Amid the disintegration of the conservative daily paper, Times management said in a Dec. 2 press release that TheConservatives.com would actually be an area of focus and growth as part of a new online strategy. But the site was conspicuously absent from a news release yesterday on the latest staff departures and the Times‘ future.
A Times spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
When the site launched in the fall, then-Times editor John Solomon told the Washington Independent he envisioned TheConservatives.com’s role as an aggregator of the best content of conservative blogs and a place where readers could create their own content.
“We want to create a new medium where things from Townhall and RedState and Twitter and Facebook are all aggregating up, and the most interesting ideas from grassroots, from the meritocracy of ideas, bubble up, using technology,” he said.
En route to that goal, the site picked up an impressive lineup of contributors: Gingrich, whose first column was “The Conservative Hour for America Has Come;” anti-tax activist Grover Norquist; Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC); Pennsylvania Senate candidate Pat Toomey; and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI).
At a Heritage Foundation event introducing the site, Solomon described the role of TheConservatives.com social media feed in promoting Gingrich’s comment calling Sonia Sotomayor “racist”:
Everything Newt Gingrich did on the social media space-on Facebook, on Twitter-was aggregating through the technology. We were sitting there-[seasoned Times reporter] Ralph Hallow was sitting alongside of me-and all of a sudden this little Twitter burst comes up from Newt, saying Sotomayor was racist. We jumped on it, we put that out there. That created, as you remember, days and days of a firestorm about whether her personal views about race and gender were biasing her views from the bench.
(This post has been revised to include confirmation from Faughnan.)
