Andrew Sullivan on the difference between blogging for yourself vs. blogging for a media site:
It’s salient, isn’t it, that even aggregator sites like Huff and Drudge are anchored by a personality embedded in their very titles. In the end, what’s unique online is what’s unique in life: the human individual….I’ve struggled with this, of course, myself. Why not just be an independent site, like TPM? The very difficult and entirely new attempt to integrate the Dish into, first Time and now the Atlantic has been a work-in-progress and sometimes confoundingly tricky.
The only reason this struck me is that my experience has been so different. When I moved from my own personal site to the Washington Monthly in 2004, there wasn’t even a glimmer of struggle. I had to bookmark a new URL to enter blog text, and that was about it. Almost literally, nothing else changed. When I moved from the Monthly to Mother Jones, ditto. I pointed my browser to a different place and just kept on doing exactly the same thing.
Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but at both places I’ve had editors who were happy to let me do my thing without interference, and since I work out of my home I hardly even noticed the change. I wonder how common my experience is compared to Andrew’s?
