WTMJ Has Pulled Jessica McBride’s Blog Offline

Trying to get it at the usual location gets a big 404.

This happened just this morning.

Pulling the blog was done in response to an explicit request (demand, really) made by McBride late Saturday night. Understandably unhappy with being abruptly pulled off the air, McBride told Tom Parker at WTMJ:

I have decided that I am not interested in being affiliated with Journal Communications in any fashion anymore. Thank you for the offer to continue my blog, but I have decided to decline. Please remove my picture, my editorial content, and my name immediately from your site.

Parker was conciliatory, asking McBride for the web address of her new blog, in case listeners requested it.

Of course, McBride can be found at her old blog location, which does not depend on the good will of WTMJ management.

[Update]

McBride’s new/old blog is getting pounded with traffic. As of this moment (8:20 p.m.), she is getting 83 hits per hour and has gotten 1,391 hits today.

You can see the status as of the time you are reading this by hitting this link.

So she doesn’t seem to be hurting a lot due to ending her affiliation with WTMJ. She now has complete editorial control and a lot of readers. She shook some things up, and posted an award-winning series on an inner city youth, before she became a corporate blogger for WTMJ. There is plenty of reason to expect her to pick up where she left off.