Andrew Sullivan is having yet another pledge drive. His rationale?
The very success of the site – doubling in traffic roughly every twelve months – has also meant ever-expanding expenses, bandwidth and workload. We’re now catering to the same number of readers as established political magazines, but we have essentially an editorial staff of one. It was once relatively easy to deal with the work part-time. No longer. From filtering through over 700 emails a day to scanning the Internet for stories and ideas to writing tens of thousands of words a month, this blog is a full-time job. I love it; I’ve learned an enormous amount from it; but it has meant giving up other assignments, postponing a book contract, and working on weekends and in the early hours of the morning. I’ve rarely missed a day in the past twelve months, apart from the yearly August breather. And I am not beholden to any big media entity. But that’s why I need your support – to keep this site independent, aggressive, timely and indebted to no-one but you.
Andrew is a terrific writer and I’m sympathetic to the bandwidth argument. His traffic is exponentially higher than mine, so I’m sure the site is somewhat expensive to run. On the other hand, I could do without the “I can’t do this alone because it’s too much work” argument. He posts less frequently than I do, for goodness sakes–and I’m a poor straight man with a regular job.
