Conservative Power

Salem Communications, owner of Christian and talk radio stations, is buying up popular conservative websites.  The empire already includes more than 100 Christian and conservative talk-radio stations.

The California-based company has recently gobbled up sites that reach millions of readers, like Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy.com, the Eagle Publishing group which is home to RedState.com, HumanEvents.com and the conservative publishing house Regnery.

Though Salem doesn’t appear to be planning major changes to the sites, media experts say the move represents a bid to consolidate the huge conservative market and power up the company’s effort to reach beyond its core conservative Christian devotees to possibly become more of a powerful political force on the right.

With the expansion, Salem is well-positioned to expand its audience - and its conservative influence - by tapping a new group of listeners and readers described by one media observer as those who are “the sister or cousin” of the hardcore Tea Party member who’s already tuned in.

Adding Twitchy into its portfolio, Salem called itself “the largest social media driven conservative platform on the Web with nearly 10 million unique readers and over 100 million page views each month.” 

The expansion also brings some of the bigger names of conservative blogging, like Erick Erickson and Mary Katharine Ham, under one roof. In 2012, the publicly traded company generated $108 million of gross profit on $229 million of revenue.

Since going public in 1999, Salem has gradually evolved from Christian-only media to include right-wing political talk and non-Christian hosts like Dennis Prager and Michael Medved. 

Jonahtan Garthwaite, the founder of Town Hall and now vice president and general manager for Salem’s political web businesses, said Salem understands the value of digital properties and plans to continue to grow its holdings in that area.

“It’s fair to say that we are not done,” Garthwaite said. “We are always looking to grow organically and through acquisition. We’re always looking for opportunities, personalities to fuel that growth. 

Websites can build up personalities, groom people for prime time. It works really well in that sense.”  Read more: