Andrew Sullivan stops writing at The Dish: it's the end of a blogging era

Andrew Sullivan, the longtime blogger who was incredibly prolific in a way that is increasingly unfashionable online, announced on Wednesday that he intends to stop blogging at The Dish, the independent website he’s run for the past two years on money donated from loyal readers.

The sudden halt represents both the end of a blogging era – and perhaps its most famous blogger, watching a new, blog-less era pass him by.

“[A]lthough it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight),” Sullivan wrote in a blogpost. “That’s long enough to do any single job.”

Like so many who spend their days online toiling among tweets and takes, Sullivan also cited a bit of online burnout and a desire to return to the “real world”.

But in the real word of digital media, most people come to articles through sharing platforms like Facebook or Twitter, and it’s getting less and less profitable to run a blog that “covers everything”.

The Dish has been operating independently since January 2013, when Sullivan detached his brand from The Daily Beast – and before that The Atlantic and Time magazine. But it was an unusually exotic beast in the growing zoo of personality-driven news-analysis sites like Vox, Fusion, First Look Media and Nate Silver’s revamped FiveThirtyEight that cropped up in the last year.

But then Sullivan always insisted that he liked the independence that blogging afforded him, the way it liberated him from popular tastes. Go all the way back to 2002 and you can find him boasting on Slate that his “little blog” was supported entirely by readers and could stay away from venture capital.

Rather than rely on young staffers to provide the majority of The Dish’s content under their own bylines, the site was usually more like The Andrew Show, unless guest-bloggers were in to cover for him on vacation.

(Full disclosure: In December, I got one of the bigger surprises in my short career in journalism when Sullivan emailed me and asked me to guest-blog for him while he took a break.)

Whether Sullivan will close The Dish entirely and drop his staff went left unsaid in his announcement. But it’s hard to imagine The Dish continuing on without Sullivan, because the standalone Dish relied – for all of its independent revenue – on its readers’ loyalty to The Andrew Show.

This loyalty was not particularly elastic at the best of times. His audience was always small (only some 30,000 readers subscribed) if apparently influential.

Sullivan had honed his reputation and voice over the course of a long sojourn in the blogging trenches. He did not come up a blogger; he’d been the top editor at The New Republic. But he took to blogging like a child to cheddar goldfish crackers. From the beginning, he seemed to love the ability to write shortform, which he often said was unpolished.

Many will no doubt be quick to connect Sullivan’s sudden pseudo-retirement with the recent debates among the insider-media set about the revamping of The New Republic. The style and substance of that magazine in his era had come under considerable attack in recent weeks. Sullivan was out front defending it, and the timing does look a little suspect.

But long before any Facebook millionaires were offending Serious Journalists, Sullivan was sounding glum.

“Yep, I’m pretty depressed by journalism right now,” he told Capital New York in October. And whether or not you were really a fan of his, or a fan of The Dish … he’s certainly not alone.