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What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

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Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#11

Post by Steko »

Chevalier wrote: post #9

I'm not Sullivan's biggest fan, but... if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger, who can? Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers -- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And while it's not easy to run…

He made it he just got burnt out and wanted to write longform pieces (err books) rather than blog all his waking hours.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#12

Post by scarmig »

Chevalier wrote: post #9

I'm not Sullivan's biggest fan, but... if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger, who can? Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers -- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And while it's not easy to run…

The emerging model is having a blog function as a loss leader to a different--often ideological, professional, or business--project.

The occasional personal blog isn't dead or dying, but the number of eyeballs reading them will be an increasingly small proportion of the total.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#13

Post by msabalau »

ddingus wrote: post #8

Nothing at all. I don't see comments on his blog. That's not really blogging. Bloggers, who take comments, actually entertaining community dialog are doing just fine. Sullivan will have no impact as that just isn't what he does.

Comments are common, yet are hardly an essential part of blogging.

Regardless, a more than cursory glance at the Dish would show that curated reader engagement is one of the most important parts of the site. One can easily make the case that the quality of that content stands in sharp contrast to the thoughtless automated approach that many bloggers take.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#14

Post by glesica »

Chevalier wrote: post #9

I'm not Sullivan's biggest fan, but... if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger, who can? Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers -- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And while it's not easy to run…

Do wealthy, educated people click on ads online? I'm not wealthy, but I'm educated, and I don't even see ads online, let alone click on them (Adblock). Most of the other educated people I know are the same way (the non-technical among them may not even realize there still are ads online).

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#15

Post by bovermyer »

ddingus wrote: post #8

Nothing at all. I don't see comments on his blog. That's not really blogging. Bloggers, who take comments, actually entertaining community dialog are doing just fine. Sullivan will have no impact as that just isn't what he does.

Not really blogging? Thank you so much for your enlightening wisdom. I imagine, then, that Scripting News and other such long-standing blogs need a new moniker. Care to offer one?

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#16

Post by pnathan »

I had never heard of him prior to 2 weeks ago. He is exceptionally thoughtful. His reason for quitting blogging seemed reasonable, especially given the timeframes involved. I don't think it says anything about blogging in general that one intelligent person is moving to a new position.

On the other hand, I don't know that I'd call the blogosphere vibrant or even very interesting: Crappy mobile browers/keyboards, link aggregators, Facebook, and Twitter basically shot the web as we knew it dead for the mainstream. My intuition is that this is a natural consequence response to decentralization when the tools to gather your information into one place are poor. You wind up with link aggregators, and then comments on them, and then the link aggregators become the content. Like what's going right now in this thread, instead of a blog link bouncing around between disparate interlinked blog posts.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#17

Post by mwfunk »

ddingus wrote: post #8

Nothing at all. I don't see comments on his blog. That's not really blogging. Bloggers, who take comments, actually entertaining community dialog are doing just fine. Sullivan will have no impact as that just isn't what he does.

I don't want to read someone having a conversation with their community, I want to read what they themselves think without the lurking context of the subset of their audience that demands to speak up and be heard right then and there.

I also frequently don't like the results of community feedback shaping a blog; a lot of times it just puts the writer on the defensive all the time, and can easily become toxic and contribute to burnout. If you can read even the best comments on the best blogs and not want to just give up on humanity forever, you're a better man than I (either that, or you were one of the people writing those comments and thought they were awesome).

There's already plenty of places on the Internet for people to discuss things written elsewhere on the Internet, like right here for example. Or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or any number of other places where you have persistent communities of commenters. If it's just comments at the bottom of an article, you end up with a lot of drive-by comments that are even more dumb or pointlessly cruel or boring or strangely insistent about your potential to make $2500/day at home on your computer, just like I did! Because you totally can.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#18

Post by jerf »

Chevalier wrote: post #9

I'm not Sullivan's biggest fan, but... if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger, who can? Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers -- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And while it's not easy to run…

It's realistic to me that individual bloggers can't live on advertising. The well-known corrosive effects of ads are too big to deny. I'd particularly cite the need it creates to pump out tons of "views" to tons of "eyeballs" which is corrosive to any sort of quality that might let one stand apart from a crowd of others doing the same thing. (And please note how I phrased that, it's very important. I'm not saying they can't have quality in some snobbish sense, I mean it leaves them unable to cultivate any unusual quality that might let them dominate some micro-niche under such constraints.) But I've got at least one guy in my Patreon lineup that I'm essentially sponsoring to write his blog. In that particular case it's not political, but there's no particular reason why that couldn't work.

But I would say at least speaking for myself that for politics, I would expect to either see some very original, quality thinking, or some sort of substantial research being done if I'm going to be paying for it. Party-line punditry's supply already verges on the infinite. (Not a crack at Sullivan. I never read his blog, I have no opinion about the writing I've never read. Just an observation from the other political blogs I read.)

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#19

Post by ddingus »

mwfunk wrote: post #17
ddingus wrote: post #8

Nothing at all. I don't see comments on his blog. That's not really blogging. Bloggers, who take comments, actually entertaining community dialog are doing just fine. Sullivan will have no impact as that just isn't what he does.

I don't want to read someone having a conversation with their community, I want to read what they themselves think without the lurking context of the subset of their audience that demands to speak up and be heard right then and there. I also frequently don't like the results of community feedback shaping a blog; a lot of times it just puts the writer on the defensive all the time, and can easily become toxic and cont…

He's broadcasting, not blogging.

And I like writers on the defensive. When they write crap, and they take comments, the crap comes up awful quick.

Notice how a lot of sites don't take comments? Notice how many of them are very seriously moderated?

One could argue trolls, and that's a fair case. However, not actually being out there enough to take feedback on one's words tends to make nice, magic, bubbles, filled with unicorns and rainbows.

Sullivan occupies one of those bubbles.

And it's not just comments. It's dialogs, even among peers. Sullivan largely just broadcasted.

Either way, his departure means pretty much nothing.

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