Politics

Andrew Sullivan — And Surviving As A Blogger

Matt K. Lewis Senior Contributor
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Andrew Sullivan is retiring as a blogger, and though there’s some suggestion his influence has waned, his farewell message raises questions about the medium and the toll it takes on writers. It’s hard to bitch about being paid to blog (working a “real” job would be tougher), but being tied to a blog — where you are perpetually expected to immediately have an opinion on every issue, and where the demand for constant content requires five or ten posts a day, every day — can become a man-made prison.

Try doing it day in and day out for a while, and find out. As Tony Kornheiser says of hosting a daily radio show: What’s your Thursday show gonna sound like?

Henry Kissinger once wrote that policy makers live off the intellectual capital they bring with them to office, because they don’t have time to build more capital. Bloggers face a similar problem. If you’re always worried about weighing in on the latest news — if you feel pressure to post five or ten posts a day — when will you have to do a deep dive, to read, go on the campaign trail, conduct long-form interviews, shadow sources, etc.? What if you’re always chasing the urgent and ephemeral, but never learning about the important? Will you ever get around to reading Days of Fire or The Looming Tower, much less writing your own book?

Newt Gingrich likes to use a parable to make this point: A lion, Gingrich says, is capable of killing field mice and eating them. But the energy expended to do so daily would cause it to slowly starve to death. As such, lions, Gingrich advises, should ignore field mice, and focus instead of hunting antelope. The danger for bloggers and writers is that we are constantly chasing field mice.

(Now, the truth is that Sullivan has tackled some very substantive material. Additionally much of what he did amounted to curation, which can be a real service, but is also less time consuming and emotionally draining than constantly producing original content. Still, this requires hustling.)

This is all to say that I can sympathize with Sullivan. It’s really hard to complain about getting paid to write stuff and voice your opinion, but there are pressures (some of which are self imposed) that would be hard for anyone who hasn’t done it to understand. But there is another aspect to this that I suspect an increasing number of us can understand, and that has to do with a sort of addiction to the internet. 

“I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again,” Sullivan tells us, and I don’t doubt it. Being constantly plugged in, and producing constant content, takes a toll on the soul. I recently heard a really good Bloggingheads interview with David Roberts of Grist, who basically unplugged for a year. If you want to get a better sense of this, it’s worth checking out.

Having said that, I suspect that part of the reason for this burnout is that Sullivan’s blog was so popular that he was never forced to evolve his blogging style. In essence, he’s a victim of his own success. Here, I think Chris Cillizza makes a lot of sense:

As I explain to anyone who will listen to me  an ever-shrinking populace  a “blog” is simply a publishing medium. It’s a way to put content on the Internet  usually a fast and, relatively, user-friendly way. But, the conflating a publishing medium with a sort of online writing  opinionated, snarky  that tends to be the preferred approach of many of its users is a mistake.

Due to his wild success, Sullivan basically stuck with the original blogger paradigm, which required vigorous production of content. But the rest of us who were still grappling with how to make blogging work — who didn’t enjoy this amount of success — eventually adapted to changing times. Today, I have no expectation that anyone comes to this blog space hoping that I might have posted something new. (I mean, I hope they do, but I don’t expect them to.) More likely, they follow me on Twitter, and when I write something interesting, that link drives them to this space. As such, I am not plagued by as much guilt if I take a day off.

So yes, this is a blog, inasmuch as it is updated frequently, somewhat informal, and (very) lightly edited. But because readers now consume media differently, I am no longer tethered to it the way I was in the pre-Twitter era. So, in a way, I think Sullivan was a victim of his own success. Here’s more from Cillizza:

If you don’t try to evolve on the Web, you quickly become Blockbuster to whoever becomes Netflix. I still love politics as much as ever but I am older now and like writing and doing different things. The blog changes reflect those expanding interests.

I may change my mind when I hit the 15-year mark like Sullivan has, but I suspect it’s all about balance. If you want long-term success, you’ll have to find a way to replenish the well. This demands taking vacations (which Sullivan, to his credit, did), staying in physical shape, reading a lot, nurturing your soul, maintaining a happy family life and hobbies, and finding balance between chasing the urgent and timely stories, while also focusing on big-picture work that will make you proud and might — might! — just stand the test of time.

And therein lies the problem. It is incredibly difficult to balance these things. Sullivan might have been able to do it all, had he adapted his blogging style the way many of us have. But sometimes you can’t “manage” an addiction — you have to quit cold turkey.

Matt K. Lewis