Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity. —Charles Johnson & Roger L. Simon —Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas (OSM.org)

I’ve been watching this one unfold from a distance.

A company called Pajamas Media (a reference to CNN president Jonathan Klein’s dismissal of the typical blogger as “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas”) changed it’s name to Open Source Media. Bloggers noted that this name conflicts with the name of Christopher Lyndon’s “Open Source” radio show, and began tracking changes to Open Source Media’s version of the name-change story.

Johnson and Simon have rightly pointed out the problems with Dan Rather’s arrogant response to bloggers who pointed out flaws in the CBS coverage of Memogate, so it was rather surprising to see that it took some time for Open Source Media to admit that the company made a big mistake. (See Lyndon’s description of the name problem.)

The Pajamas Media website, however, still contains material dismissing “Pajamas Media” as a temporary name that they will soon shed.

Why We’ll Be Changing Our Name

When the bloggers who started this company first came together it was almost natural we would call ourselves Pajamas Media. It was a playful tip of the hat to that moment when bloggers exposed the misreporting of CBS anchor Dan Rather. At that time, an ex-executive for CBS tried to dismiss us as riffraff in “pajamas.” But the bloggers were right, CBS was wrong, Rather retired (without apologizing) and the rest is history.

But as we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It’s not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new. To do that, we needed a name that would allow us to grow. And that name we are in the process of deciding.

What a PR fiasco. It wasn’t as if the people involved suddenly decided to change their name and picked one at random. They planned this, but didn’t plan well enough.

While they responded slowly in terms of the blogging cycle, they still cleared it all up within a week, which is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.