Andrew Sullivan moved to Time last week, and it's interesting that what once would have seemed like a major event almost escaped my notice entirely. Sullivan did more than any other single writer to get me reading blogs, not just because he was so early to the game or because 9/11 and the War on Terror gave his writing a uniquely compelling context, but because (as I wrote last February), he "blazed a path for people like myself who don't feel particularly
well-represented by the reigning ideologies on the Right or the Left."
When Sullivan temporarily retired from blogging last year,
I missed him, but it wasn't difficult to fill that void. Perhaps not suprisingly, Sullivan couldn't stay away from blogging, but I never got back into the habit of reading him--partly because I was simply tired of the shrillness of the blogosphere's political discourse and found myself more fulfilled by reading and writing on other topics, and partly because I felt that Sullivan himself had become somewhat shrill in response to his critics. (While I'd praised him as "a sassy, snarky writer with a keen bullshit detector," I suppose the line between snarky and shrill is finer than I once thought.)
But reminded of his presence by the move to Time, I've added him back to my Bloglines subscriptions--I'm curious to see if I stick with it.
On a related note: This is a win-win for both Sullivan and Time--he's freed from the headaches of maintaining his site while sacrificing relatively little (so far) in the way of branding, and they get the attention and traffic that come with a bigfoot blogger. But I also sense that missed opportunities in the past have brought Sullivan and Time together today, and they're hoping to make up for lost time.
For example, a number of serious political bloggers who followed in Sullivan's footsteps have turned their sites into sustainable and freestanding destinations: Daily Kos, Instapundit, Eschaton, Michelle Malkin, and PowerLine, to name just a few that get more than twice Sullivan's daily traffic, according to the TTLB rankings.
And plenty of media & news sites are far more popular than Time.com, according to Alexa. As of today, Time is a respectable #1,087 in Alexa's traffic rankings, but the BBC Online is #22, CNN is #26, the New York Times is #72, the Washington Post is #196, USA Today is #240, Forbes is #270, Fox News is #290, Reuters is #291, and the Wall Street Journal is #399.
Those are perhaps unfair comparisons, but I think its fair to say that neither Time nor Sullivan took full advantage of their respective opportunities (Time as the leading pre-Web newsweekly, Sullivan as the first political blogger with a national profile), and that perhaps this union will be a fresh start for both of them.
tags: blogging journalism andrew sullivan time time magazine
