The wheels are coming off the rickshaw

Keith emailed me this link last week, and although it's a month old, it's well worth reading. It appears that Ron Unz has decided to give Betsy Woodruff from National Review the scoop on how an editor of the magazine that he supposedly owns, The American Conservative, disregards the fact of his ownership.

A conflict at The American Conservative has led its publisher, Ron Unz, to claim he’s being “purged” from the magazine. And in an e-mail obtained by National Review Online, the magazine’s editor said he would resign if the board “would prefer that Ron Unz decide what we publish.”

It gets funnier from there. Editor Daniel McCarthy accuses Unz of not contributing very much to TAC; Unz claims he's the second biggest donor. McCarthy calls Unz's articles too long to publish, Unz claims they rock. I don't know why he doesn't just fire this McCarthy clown for insubordination, but publishing nonprofit online newsletters isn't my industry, thank God. My favorite part:

Unz says he also thinks the budget is being misspent.

“I checked with a few people I know who are bloggers for a few other websites,” he says, “and I found out that, based on traffic figures, TAC was basically paying a lot of its bloggers five to ten times the market rate.”

He also says that Rod Dreher generates close to half of the website’s traffic but is only paid “a very small fraction of TAC’s budget.”

No wonder the poor guy is tired. He's pulling the rickshaw with all these other fat, grumpy clowns on hanging off it. Of course he might just be better at hitting trends like Miley Cyrus, etc.

He also says the magazine is in danger of being seen as unserious.

“Some of the stuff TAC is publishing right now is so bad,” he says. “For three straight days their whole homepage was filled with articles about zombies and robots and cartoon characters and rock bands. Nobody will take you seriously if you publish that sort of stuff.”

“Maybe it’s the only stuff they can publish without paying people,” he added.

Wait — I thought they were paying people too much? I'm so confused. An ex-TAC writer summarizes the internal strife.

“The magazine largely was founded to discuss conservative perspectives that they didn’t think were well represented by the other conservative magazines,” he says. “So that, in and of itself, opens [the magazine] up to being affiliated with people who are kind of quirky thinkers; and people who are quirky thinkers tend to have temperaments where they’re going to have trouble getting along at times, and they’re going to have disagreements, and they’re going to think their disagreements are of this earth-shattering significance, when maybe they aren’t.”

Yeah, what the man said. Hilarious.