February 26, 2011 12:43 AM UTC

"Face the State" Bids Adieu (Again)

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• by: Colorado Pols

Westword, we hate drawn-out goodbyes:

Face the State, a conservative-skewing news outlet that Westword named 2009’s Best Political Blog, is no more. While the site’s still online, founder Brad Jones confirms FTS has reached “the end of the road, and I will be moving on to other opportunities.”

What sealed its fate? Finances, of course. “Journalism is a tough business to be in,” Jones says. But pulling the plug has been tough, since “I think we were doing something creative and original.”

The four-year-old site has had plenty of fiscal challenges. In August 2009, Face the State went on hiatus, with Jones predicting that restructuring the operation would take a couple of months. This estimate proved to be overly optimistic: Face the State 2.0 debuted in April 2010, complete with new staffers, including former Westword reporter Jared Jacang Maher, a high-profile contributor in former Rocky Mountain News columnist Peter Blake, and a mandate to be less wonky…

One of the primary problems with “Face the State” was Jones’ insistence that it was a “news site,” after long since being recognized as an outlet for Republican talking points. People criticize Colorado Pols for different things, but we’ve never claimed that we were anything other than a “blog.” We aren’t “journalists,” and this isn’t a “news site.” That’s okay, and Jones and “Face the State” would have been better served by not pretending to be something they weren’t. Jones says that “journalism is a tough business to be in,” which is true…but he wasn’t in that business.

The chief financier of Brad Jones’ online conservative news site was widely rumored to be oil tycoon Alex Cranberg, who you might have read was appointed recently by Texas Gov. Rick Perry as a regent at the University of Texas. We’ve heard that Cranberg was never very happy with the net impact of Jones’ online (or printed) media offerings, but who knows? Maybe “Face the State” could be rebranded into “Face the Lone Star State.”

Or, maybe the next “Face the State” will just write stories others care to read. That’s our primary suggestion. At the end of the day, you could call “Face the State” whatever you wanted, but you couldn’t call it “compelling.”