Andrew Sullivan Says He's Done Blogging
Andrew Sullivan has announced on his blog, The Dish, that he has "decided to stop blogging in the near future"
Founding editor of The Dish, Andrew Sullivan, announced this afternoon on his blog that he has “decided to stop blogging in the near future.”
He cites two overarching reasons for his departure from the blogosphere: 1) after fifteen straight years of blogging, he wants to shake things up and “move on to new things”; 2) he has become “saturated in digital life” and wants to return to the actual world — one with his family, books, and less stress.
“I’m a human being before I am a writer,” says Sullivan in his farewell piece. “And a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.”
Sullivan, a former editor of The New Republic, founded The Dish (originally “The Daily Dish”) back in the summer of 2000, going solo with it for its first 6 years. He took the blog to Time.com and then to TheAtlantic.com in 2006, where the blog expanded with new interns to meet its growing need for web content. Then in 2011, he and three former interns, Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner, and Zoe Pollock, made the move from The Atlantic for The Daily Beast, losing its “Daily” qualifier and officially becoming “The Dish.”
The Dish, once again, gained its independence in February of 2013 when it formed Dish Publishing LLC, and since then, it has had a readership of around 1.2 million visitors with an average of around 8 million pageviews a month from around the world — covering everything “from politics to religion and pop culture and art and film and poetry and philosophy and web humor.”
For his readers, it will certainly be sad to see him go, however, his ambition to take his writing to new heights with “old forms” is certainly an admirable endeavor.
“When I write again, it will be for you, I hope – just in a different form,” Sullivan emotionally signed off. “I need to decompress and get healthy for a while; but I won’t disappear as a writer. But this much I know: nothing will ever be like this again, which is why it has been so precious; and why it will always be a part of me, wherever I go; and why it is so hard to finish this sentence and publish this post.”
