So Andrew Sullivan is quitting blogging, and the blogosphere commences its latest round of hand wringing and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The annual preemptive mourning for blogging’s shedding of its mortal coil has now become such a ritual that the commentary itself has reached its own critical mass of self-referential, ironic meta-awareness. “This isn’t another ‘death of blogging’ post,” many articles begin, before going on to prove the writer is either fibbing or in need of a good editor (or perhaps both).

Pardon the snark. It’s early and I’m still on my first cup of coffee. Like everyone else who reads or subscribes to Sullivan’s “Dish,” I was caught utterly unaware of its impending demise and am grieving the loss of such a unique virtual gathering place. His was an enormous influence on the blogosphere not just for his commentary, but for his success in commoditizing his readership into a nearly self-sustaining economic model.

The unspoken fear here is, “If Sully can’t do it, what the heck kind of chance do I have?” The answer is, of course, none. Sullivan found that to blog consistently at his level required him to spend all day on a nonstop frictionless hamster wheel, despite having under his belt several decades’ worth of patient base-building, endless campaigning, and media appearances on shows you and I will never, ever, get on in our wildest dreams. And even with that kind of infrastructure, he had to run all day long just to stay in place. So Sullivan’s example demonstrates pretty clearly that self-made media empires aren’t really all that likely a thing in nature.

On the other hand, as the Vox article points out, a lot of media superstars are going back to “old-fashioned” blogging, free of all the revenue encumbrances. They’ve come full circle and realized that blogging, if it’s going to be part of a media enterprise, is fundamentally a loss-leader. Blogging doesn’t generate 1:1 revenue; you have to find another, sustainable source of revenue that gives you the stability and freedom to blog.

Hopefully they will take that lesson out a couple of concentric rings and realize that’s how the news works, too. Whether television, radio, print, or online, journalism isn’t a profit center — but the breakthrough here is to realize that profitability isn’t a useful measure of its value. News, like blogging, is a qualitative thing. Its value can’t be measured using quantitative means.

Maybe instead of “information wants to be free,” the new motto will be “information wants to be valued,” because that’s what Stewart Brand was really talking about:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

So here at the end of our latest installment of Death Of Blogging Watch, I find myself optimistic. Because this time the discussion is taking place among a critical mass of people who have finally come to understand (and publicly acknowledge) the complexity and the implications of this fundamental tension, and who by and large seem to be coming down on the qualitative side of the argument.

Despite the departure of yet another giant from the blogosphere, blogging — and by extension, professional writing of all kinds, including journalism — isn’t in fact dying.

It’s just getting warmed up for its next act.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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