Andrew Sullivan, on blogging
Andrew Sullivan, who writes for “the most popular one-man political blog site in the world†has written a piece for The Atlantic with the excruciating title of “Why I Blog.”
In it, he spends a considerable amount of space noting the immediacy of the medium, using this as a scapegoat for the slapdash, thinly-sourced material that can be found on most blogs:
No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Sullivan is commenting on the Instapundit style of blogging, one he engages in regularly. Though one can rise to popularity with this kind of blogging through luck (Instapundit, Atrios) or because of prior celebrity status (Sullivan), the rest of us who are scrambling for readers rarely gain traction without more thoughtful original content. And there are a few of us (cough cough) who take the time to actually interview subjects, people who aren’t completely beholden by the immediacy of the web.
As David Appell astutely observed a few months ago:
For example, I think Andrew Sullivan, by becoming a blogger, has completely ruined his standing as a writer of serious political and gay analysis. Now he posts 40 times a a day, and includes so many insipid or inconsequential things and meaningless pieces of campaign gossip, and very, very little (i.e. none) of what he writes changes my life in any way whatsoever. I have stopped reading him.
And no five-page Atlantic essay providing excuses for this form of blogging will justify it.
Hear hear!
Simon – I see your point here, but Sullivan’s article to me embraces the idea of blogging without rank or order, but rather as an extension of the excruciating existence of being a writer. I think he hits more truths than falsehoods in his piece over all and your critique of him seems a bit strained. While few of the instapundit bloggers out there will never see the light of fame, the act of writing has found a new home and to me, a writer, this is the most important thing.