Roger L. Simon steps down as CEO of his creation

Roger L. Simon was a novelist and screenwriter who went through a very public political conversion from left to right in the early 2000s. His blog hammering on the left turned into Pajamas Media and now into a conservative website and video outlet called PJ Media. He has been CEO of the LA-based company but now will go back to writing novels and screenplays, while keeping a column on the site.

From his note:

If I had walked into one of those Hollywood Boulevard fortune tellers ten years ago and asked the gypsy lady behind the crystal ball “Oh, Madame Vladanska [or whatever her name was], what will my future be?” And she had replied, “You will be CEO of a new media company for seven years and three months”… I undoubtedly would have given her the evil eye and demanded my fifty dollars back. I was a novelist and a screenwriter — and had been all my life.

But Madame Vladanska would have been right. Life, as John Lennon once said, is what happens when you’re making other plans. Even though I had never dreamed of being a CEO of anything and was just learning there might be such a thing as new media, in November 2005 I became the chief executive officer of the then fledgling online company PJ Media.

Over the years that company (now PJ Media) grew, added PJTV and now is … well, not exactly a media behemoth but certainly a significant Internet player on the center-right, a respected part of the national dialogue on political affairs. I am inordinately proud of it.

Sandra Rozanski, the chief operating officer of PJ Media since 2006, will assume many of Simon’s corporate management duties, according to a press release.