Pirate Media Comes of Age

With more followers, the question remains: where is the new media going?

It’s hard to believe that some of the town’s crumbling legacy media chieftains didn’t have a frisson of fear when they noted this online Monday morning…

…assuming they bother with this newfangled thing called “online.” The number refers to PDX.Real’s Instagram “followers,” which means that PDX.Real’s dispatches are given preference whenever a viewer opens the app.

This number contrasts with “the biggest newspaper in Oregon,” which now has a print circulation of 91,827 copies on the two weekdays it still prints.

WillyWeek’s circulation is a moving target: its Media Kit doesn’t actually list a print number; instead it claims that…

…social channels and wweek.com reach hyper-engaged Oregonians: 2 million each month.

Which is a classic “your guess is as good as mine” number.

As we noted here, PDX.Real’s numbers come from the algorithms at Meta and Google and are untouched by human hands, particularly those of Old Media trying to sell advertising by the minute and square-inch.

However one massages the numbers, 100K followers means something, doesn’t it, Mr. Jones.

It means that there is a market for what PDX.Real, and other pirate media sites are providing. This, in a one-party machine-run town where the loudest megaphones are wielded by shape-shifting radicals, neo-racists, sexual-choice evangelists, cocktail-Marxists…the whole merry zoo. The megaphones are so loud that anyone who’s not on the progressive bus doesn’t have any idea that other opinions exist.

(For reference, check out local media’s uncomprehending stenography during the Covid hysteria; or its failure to dig into the Antifa anthill; or knee-jerk “climate change” propaganda; or to point out any issues inside those “communities of color.”)

That’s the real threat to the status quo from PDX.Real and its pirate media cousins: there’s a new voice in town and it isn’t singing from the standard hymnal.

The happy result is that PDX.Real and its kin are the only growing media in town. And they did it by being…well, real.

What must really gall the dons of High Media is that the folks behind PDX.Real are not properly credentialed. Renegades, you might say over drinks at the Multnomah Athletic Club.

Jeff Church, 53, is a musician and corporate moving agent; his wife, Angela Todd, 49, is an interior designer with an active practice. (In fact, their websites were on a sort of hiatus last week when the pair went to Bend to work with one of Angela’s clients.)

They’re completely uncredentialled…and also unencumbered by the dense thicket of mores in the legacy news biz. (They didn’t, for example, graduate from my alma mater, the Medill J-school at Northwestern University, which now has a professor of “social justice media” on its faculty. Which explains all you need to know about the ills of contemporary mainstream media.)

The dons of local journalism such as Therese Bottomly, Big Girl at what’s left of the Oregonian; or Mark Zusman, the semi-silent editor/publisher of WillyWeek; or any of the quartet of hot-swappable news directors at the local TV outfits…well, they must look askance at what’s happening in the way the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous era must have looked upon the small, furry mammals scurrying in the undergrowth.

After all, the dinosaurs have their very own websites, don’t they? Thus, WillyWeek can claim that an astonishing 2-million someone-or-others drop by for a looksee.

The problem is that most of the local media sites look like what they are: apparitions produced by people trapped by their own fading technologies. That’s why the Oregonian faithfully sends digital subscribers a facsimile of an old-fashioned newspaper front page…

…as if their waning readers really were desperate to be told what some faceless editors deem they really ought to rank as most important news ‘o’ the day. (Which does nothing to explain the O’s increasingly weird choice of “line” stories.)

The most pathetic attempt to play catch-up is the Oregon/Live website, a free-floating crazy quilt of occasional news buried in syndicated columns and stuff pumped out by clearly biased canned “news” sites…

…Reckon being, in its own words…

…dedicated to the fight for reproductive justice, a weekly repro rundown covering the good, the fair-to-middlin' and the ugly in repro news. Enter your email to subscribe to Reproductive Justice with Reckon.

In contrast, the Todd/Church combo is amazing act to watch, as it were, in real time. They use their followers as an ad hoc reportorial army, which produces both a dialogue and outlet for community whistle-blowers. An offhand comment from a follower produced one of their latest gotchas…

…which, you’ll note, racked up 1-million views by Instagram’s count. And their coverage of the teachers’ strike was far tougher than anyone else’s…

Church is a natural investigative journalist, digging into stories that seem to elude our terribly polite press corps…

…and digs into budgets and tracks the flow of money into the state’s dark corners….

Todd does most of the talking, often with startling candor. She wasn’t coy about the circling rumors about her entry into politics—nope, she said. Instead she challenged followers to get off their bums and get involved in the messy, street-level business of politics.

Has she occasionally sung off-key? Of course. There was the bizarre appearance of a donated souped-up golf cart…

…and an earlier offer to handle campaigning for any candidate who met the couple’s litmus test.

Among Portland media, not even misdemeanors.

Who knows where their follower-numbers will peak? Some are obviously outside the Portland metro market; a good number of commenters seem to be people happy to have escaped the Rose City.

But those numbers mean that there’s a market—indeed, a hunger—for PDX.Real’s viewpoint and its approach to news. There’s a new bus; people can join the ride. Whatever you want to call citizens who aren’t part of the progressive borg—”conservative” misses the point—they now know they’re not isolated, alone.

What dissenters have needed in this town is a gathering node—a spot where alliances can be made, insights exchanged, friendships founded, support made mutual. That’s the real potential of PDX.Real and its other pirate media kin. Angela Todd is right: it’s time for concerned citizens to get off their keesters. They’ll have support.

Meanwhile, the duo’s biggest challenge is to change those startling numbers into, well…dollars. The old expression, “The Internet Wants to be Free” is a killer for new media. They have a de facto staff, mostly volunteers, but being able to leave their day-jobs behind is the next challenge. For us as well as them.

So, too, is the inherent limitation of the Instagram format. Their reporting is growing from “gotchas” and “holy shit” to longer, more deeply sourced and researched stories, which are outgrowing the confines of Instagram Reels and X/Twitter feeds. (We cross-posted one of Church’s Substack pieces on PBOT’s foibles here; but they’ve yet to figure out how to exploit that venue.)

The Internet is a voracious beast: it demands minute-by-minute feeding. So far, the PDX.Real duo has managed to keep the beast fed; but Ms. Todd says she has bunches of stories that are beyond the pair’s resources.

We’d love to read ‘em.