The end of one era begets the start of another.

I want to thank my friend and colleague Allahpundit, who has left for other opportunities at The Dispatch. He gave us sixteen years of his wit and insight, and gave me fourteen years of collegiality and friendship that will continue long after this. As he wrote on Friday, we have had a great working environment, and he will be missed among us.

With his departure, I have been made managing editor of HotAir.com – the very first in our long history. My new mission is to position Hot Air for the midterms and the 2024 election cycle as the, well, hottest place to find conservative perspectives, trenchant analysis, and aggregation of both breaking events and sharp takes in the commentariat.

With that as my new mission, Hot Air readers will start noticing a number of changes. We have already brought Karen Townsend and David Strom on board as full-time in-house contributors; David will start next week. They’ll join Jazz Shaw and John Sexton in presenting the best of our analyses. Dawn Slusher and Beege “Tree Hugging Sis” Welborn will join us as independent contributors, and you’ll be seeing their work almost immediately.

We will also start featuring other outside contributors who can use their own expertise to give our readers fresh perspectives on a wider range of topics. Some of those will be exclusive content for our VIP members, including some new multi-media offerings within the VIP section with well-known conservatives. Tom Jackson, a veteran reporter and columnist with the Tampa Tribune, will give us exclusive analyses of Florida politics in the midterms and 2024 cycles. Duane “Generalissimo”  Patterson will write regularly for our members too.

Plus, I still have a couple of surprises up my sleeve for VIP members – so stay tuned, and join now if you haven’t already! Subscribe at this link with the code SAVEAMERICA and get a significant savings on both VIP and VIP Gold, which gets you membership on all of our Townhall Media sites.

Part of our new strategy will see our Headlines section expand and focus more on conservative voices and viewpoints. In fact, you may have already noticed a change over the weekend in the coverage in our marquee. We will still have links to breaking stories at traditional media outlets, but we want to help build the Right for political battle this cycle and the next. I’m very sure our readers know where to find the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR – but maybe they don’t know some of the voices and platforms on the Right as well, nor the diversity of viewpoints and issues. We definitely won’t be an echo chamber! Expect to see some new sources and a much sharper focus on the latest developments. You’ll want to reload the page often to make sure you keep up.

Needless to say, managing all of this would tax any “managing editor.” I will likely write a bit less as I take on all of these operational and strategic tasks, but rest assured I will still write a significant amount as well as continuing with my podcast publication. My focus will likely be on breaking news items, data-driven topics like polling and economic reports, and perhaps an occasional movie review!

Nor will our innovation and expansion stop with this transition. We will look for new ways to keep on top of and ahead of the curve on news, policy, debate, and the conservative commentariat in the months and years ahead. And we look forward to having you join us on that journey.

As Alan Shepard famously said … let’s light this candle!

Ed Morrissey
Managing Editor