"The future of e-zines may be in ratbag ventures such as Pigdog Journal," wrote a
reporter in Toronto. And a conservative columnist with a strange moustache has a problem
with that....
I'd never heard of Richard Poe, but apparently he read an article about Pigdog in a
Canadian newspaper last summer. I was planning on ignoring him, along with those angry
emails Matt Drudge sent Pigdog back in 1999. But Usenet
personality and Pigdog game warden Tjames Madison had the grace to compose Mr. Poe a
thoughtful response, which is reprinted below.
-- El Destino Pigdog Jenna Bush correspondent
When you wrote "the real story of the New Media lies elsewhere. It lies with a powerful
new class of Internet news moguls who have bootstrapped their way to the top, with small
staffs, hard work, little capital and virtually no publicity," you described Pigdog and
didn't even know it. We have an entirely volunteer staff, and it will probably stay that
way for some time to come. People write for us because they like to do it. Nobody's
telling our staff they're going to be the Next Big Thing or anything like it. We've been
around since 1990 and we're not going away anytime soon.
That we managed to fool you into thinking it was something akin to the noisy dot-com
cash-dumps/startups from a few years ago I'll take as quite the compliment. I sure wish
we could lose $74 million like Salon.
I'm sure we seemed like a good target for your screed because of the "sleaze factor" in
the random handful of articles you pulled out as examples, and hey, I'm sure your readers
won't know the difference, but just between the two of us, maybe you should indulge
yourself in a little less intellectual dishonesty in the future. Or at least if you ever
decide to write about Pigdog again. Speaking of which, once FrontPage inevitably folds,
you're always welcome to submit articles to us. We have at least one gun nut already on
staff, and we're always on the lookout for more. Here's the address:
