Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Andrew Sullivan — perhaps the archetypal news blogger, one of the earliest traditional-media journalists to embrace the then-new form — is calling it quits. The reasons: burnout, stress, health issues, and a general desire to do something else.
…I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.
To understand Sullivan’s place in the blogging firmament, you should check out the lengthy interview he gave the team behind Riptide in 2013, in which he dove deep into his history with the medium, his views of its strengths, and why he (at least at that time) was still doing it. There’s a transcript on the Riptide site; I’m embedding the two-part videos below.
I knew it in an intellectual sense by the end of the ’90s. You just saw. At the same time, the ’90s was a time when there was this huge crash. I wanted, as a writer with a bunch of materials, to have a website. I thought I should have a website. Everybody else has a website. I had a good buddy. I didn’t know anything about it, so I said, “Would you please put my pieces up on the website so that there’s a resource I can build up?”…
Every time I called him up to say, “Could you post a new piece of mine?” He would be, “Fine,” but it wasn’t his day job. Eventually, he said, “Here’s this new platform called Blogger.com. Why don’t you put up your own pieces?” Politely. I was like, “Cool, sure!”
5 comments:
Oh! Andy say it isn’t so. We loved being the spectators at your ringing
defense/advocacy of the Bell Curve, as a key to understanding what
American life is all about: you being an outsider offered a whole new
vista on the rise of the Neo-Confederates! And whatever war your adopted
imperial homeland decided to wage against those no longer huddled
masses, who decided to fight back! Your journey from war mongering
Neo-Con to war mongering Neo-Liberal has been riveting to watch, all
couched in your unrelenting narcissism. And don’t lets speak of the
hoard of ‘reporters’ anxious to catch every golden word about our
favorite scholarship boy’s latest political obsession, who just wanted
to share. Your humble beginnings as acolyte of Thatcher the milk
snatcher on your road to greatness has been,well, so rewarding. Think of
all those lives you’ve enriched: think Afghanistan and Iraq and the
other targets for American meliorism!
Warmest regards,
Myra Breckenridge
I could not refrain from commenting. Well written!
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