Interesting that Andrew Sullivan is taking his pioneering blog from the Atlantic to the Daily Beast/ Newsweek even though the Atlantic is one of the few media organizations that seems to have money to spend.
Michael Calderone’s interview with Sullivan makes it appear that Sullivan simply couldn’t say no to Tina Brown. In fact, there’s not even any mention of the Atlantic’s making a move to keep Sullivan. So perhaps Sullivan didn’t give the Atlantic a chance.
This is not good news for the Atlantic. According to M. Amedeo Tumolillo of the New York Times, Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” accounted for as much as a quarter of the Atlantic’s 4.8 million unique monthly visitors as recently as October.
I can’t say I’m much of a Sullivan fan. His blogorrhea makes it impossible to keep up with him. At times, he can be as irresponsible as anyone in blogland. Nevertheless, Sullivan is something of an online phenomenon. This is a big loss for the Atlantic, and a win for Tina Brown.
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I’m print subscriber, and find the site great for research. In the context of the current government government shutdown, I got a hit at the Atlantic, and found a complete article from December of 1981 – the Education of David Stockman, about the FIRST shutdown. How many sites have 30 year old articles at the ready??
He’s good. I think he owes his format to Josh Marshall but there’s some relevant differences.
Some of his early Palin stuff was a bit unhinged but that was a strange sequence of events he was looking at.
I sometimes checked his site, mostly because it was a part of the debate due to the volume of his readers.
But I have never been a huge fan. First, his vitriol towards anti-war voices leading up to the Iraq War was excessive. Secondly it seems 90 percent of his blog entries are one sentence long statements with a link to a piece he wants to suggest.
But, for whatever reason, people read him. He does jump around a lot. He was @ Time for a short while, before going to the Atlantic. Bloggers these days are being moved around faster than pro athletes.