Websites are not yet going the way of newspapers, but financial stringency has arrived for web-based media, including American Thinker.  The carnage extends from independent voices to the big, investor-backed sites. At the top end, the gold rush for staking claims to digital readership has gone bust, and the Big Money investors are licking their wounds after a number of changes have taken out much of money that flowed to digital publishers. SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, presents a good overview of the forces at work that are changing the way online media struggle to survive. The focus is on the Big Money crowd: As legacy news companies suffered tremors over the past decade, money from venture capitalists poured into upstarts that promised to leverage a keener understanding online reading habits to create a giant-killing class of new media ventures. Today, the money is starting to dry up. Big ambitions have been downsized. And the tremors that...(Read Full Post)