Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air, one of the very most popular conservative blogs, has been acquired by Salem Communications, Mediaite‘s Colby Hall reports:
CPAC hasn’t even officially started and already its making news. Mediaite has learned that leading center-right web site Hot Air has been acquired by Salem Communications for an undisclosed sum. Sources close to the deal claim that Michelle Malkin, the conservative pundit and sole owner of Hot Air, has been in talks with Salem for some time, but the announcement was timed to coincide with the Conservative Political Action Conference, which opens tomorrow in Washington D.C.
Hot Air is one of the biggest, most influential conservative sites on the Web and was launched on April 24, 2006, with Michelle Malkin as founder/CEO (though she remains editorially focused on her own blog MichelleMalkin.com and her own writing and television appearances.) Hot Air is managed on a day-to-day basis by editors Ed Morrissey and the mysterious AllahPundit, who are reported to be part of the deal in the sale of to Salem, and absolutely essential to the core value of Hot Air. We are told that, from a user’s perspective, Hot Air will remain the same despite the change in ownership.
Morrissey writes “Neither Allahpundit nor I will have any official comment on this until tomorrow, but if you read our Twitter feeds last night, you already knew that a big announcement about Hot Air’s business status was on the way. What I can tell you now is that Hot Air’s current mission and direction will not change, and that both AP and I will continue being part of Hot Air for the foreseeable future.”
One presumes that Salem is sincere on this score, in that the Hot Air property will lose most of its value if it becomes something other than what readers expect. And Morrissey’s word on this has additional weight, in that he made the transition from his own solo site (Captain’s Quarters) to the more red meat-oriented Hot Air with no discernible change in his style or editorial choices.
And hearty congrats to Michelle Malkin on what one presumes was a lucrative buy-out. While her politics are harder right than mine and her writing style more polemical, she’s a sweet lady and an incredibly hard worker. She got started blogging more than a year after I did but hit the ground running, instantly figuring out how the game was played and doing it better than just about anyone else. She’s managed to spin off the success of her eponymous blog into the Hot Air project, which became even bigger.
