Controversial columnist Andrew Sullivan has announced he’s ending his tenure at the Daily Beast, which has published his blog, the Daily Dish, since 2011.
Sullivan has been been the go-to blogger for many issues, both LGBT and mainstream. Anderson Cooper came out in an email to Sullivan, who posted the news with Cooper’s permission.
Thankfully the UK-born journalist isn’t closing up shop—he’s going solo:
We felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism. And since the Dish has, from its beginnings, attempted to pioneer exactly such a solid future for web journalism, we also felt we almost had a duty to try and see if we could help break some new ground.
The only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.
And so last week, the three of us signed an agreement setting up an independent company called Dish Publishing LLC, and agreed to strike out on our own with no safety net below us but you.
As of February 1, the Daily Dish will appear exclusively on AndrewSullivan.com, but will have no advertising. Instead, funding will come from premium memberships for exclusive Dish content:
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Our particular version will be a meter that will be counted every time you hit a “Read on” button to expand or contract a lengthy post. You’ll have a limited number of free read-ons a month, before we hit you up for $19.99. Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter—so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall. It won’t. Ever. There is no paywall. Just a freemium-based meter.
We’ve tried to maximize what’s freely available, while monetizing those parts of the Dish where true Dishheads reside. The only tough love we’re offering is the answer to the View From Your Window Contest. You’ll have to become a member to find where the place is.
Sullivan insists the move isn’t generated by dissatisfaction with the Daily Beast, but rather a desire to free himself from corporate interests: “The point of doing this as simply and as purely as possible is precisely to forge a path other smaller blogs and sites can follow,” writes Sullivan. “We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality.”
His bosses at the Daily Beast, who are hosting his content through the end of January, seem supportive. “Andrew Sullivan boldly strikes off on his own,” tweeted DB co-founder Tina Brown. “Sad to see him go, but wishing [him] all the best!”
Will you follow Sullivan in his new endeavor? Let us know in the comment section below.
yaoming
Good luck wirh that. Not sure who will pay to read some blog.
hyhybt
This means his site will be another where I’m careful only to go in the first place if I know the article will be interesting, rather than my usual habit of opening just about everything on certain topics and then closing the tabs if they turn out not to be worth reading.
Wait… $20 a month!?
Other sites with far more content charge less than that for a whole year!
Cam
The NYTimes tried this ages ago and they were shocked to realize that just because some of their colomnists were popular, that didn’t mean that people would bother to pay to read them.
I could be wrong, but I think that Sullivan is overestimating how interesting people find him.
hyhybt
@Cam: Unless they’ve changed since November, the NYT still has theirs. It’s less strict than when first implemented, but when I was reading 538 every day in October I ran into it.
hyhybt
@hyhybt: …and promptly switched to another browser just for their site until it cleared again.
Michael Bedwell
Andrew Sullivan? Andrew Sullivan? Could it be THIS Andrew Sullivan:
.
1. The one who promoted the racist junk science of “The Bell Curve” when he was the editor at “New Republic.”
2. The one who got his slimy dick publicly caught in his own sticky zipper when it was revealed that at the same time he was using his columns to denounce “promiscuous gay men” and Bill Clinton’s for his “reckless” “sexual risks” he — even though HIV+ — was TROLLing the Net for bareback sex with assorted constellations of couplings as long as they weren’t fat, fem, etc., etc.
3. The one who attacked legislation like ENDA agreeing with the Antigay Industry that gay job protection is an unfair “special right.”
4. The one who regularly railed against real gay activists—who paved the yellow brick road for a hack like him to become the favorite Fag Lap Dog of White Straight Male Mainstream Media rather than just another slob-overweight, bald, Brit, priapismic poof with a moldy gym card, perpetual jock itch, and a perpetual fantasy of being dominated by walking/breathing Tom of Finland cartoons.
5. The one who’s repeatedly insisted that “AIDS is over” and people should judge stop kvetching so much about it. Translation: I’m a white male with money living in the US so fuck all those millions of people of color here and around the world who are dying even as he sips Martoonies in Ptown.
6. The Andrew Sullivan who was like Richard Simmons with a baton and a bazooka as he became the highest profile Sodomitic drum major for the invasion of Iraq, only turning against it when it failed to meet his expectations of what we’re still not sure.
7. The Andrew Sullivan who in January declared anyone as “DUMB” who didn’t agree with him that Barack Obama was the bees’ knees. [Guess he got over the Bell Curve.]
8. The Andrew Sullivan who, as Salon observed, “spent three years continuously insisting that President Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriages was largely irrelevant (‘We will win not by begging presidents to back us (they have no role in a matter involving state legislatures, governors and courts’). Based on that view, he constantly berated gay groups and gay activists for complaining about Obama’s opposition to marriage equality: ‘this desperate desire among some gays for some kind of affirmation from one man is a little sad’, but, then, wrote an even more embarrassing love letter to Obama after his QUASI embrace of marriage equality, engineering some variation of his fellow pathological Catholickers’ miracle of transubstantiantion by converting St. Barack into “The First Gay President.”
.
THAT Andrew Sullivan? I’d pay him $20 just to STFU.
the other Greg
I’d pay $10 if he promised never to be a guest on Bill Maher’s show ever again.
QJ201
How many Log Cabin Republicans, GoProuders and Closest Cases does it take to pay for Andy’s house in Provincetown?
awohio
Yes, I would pay money to read what Andrew Sullivan writes. I’ve bought his books and have no problem throwing him a $20 for this experiment.
@hyhybt: No, he is recommending $20 a year…not a month. His post also notes that a link to his site won’t be counted against the “limited number of free read-ons”. See the relevant paragraph from the post below…
“Our particular version will be a meter that will be counted every time you hit a “Read on” button to expand or contract a lengthy post. You’ll have a limited number of free read-ons a month, before we hit you up for $19.99. Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter – so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall. It won’t. Ever. There is no paywall. Just a freemium-based meter. We’ve tried to maximize what’s freely available, while monetizing those parts of the Dish where true Dishheads reside.”
hyhybt
@awohio: Ah, that’s different then. $20 a year is much more reasonable. I still won’t *pay* it, because I rarely read his writings anyway, but for those who do it’s not so bad.
alterego1980
He is on MSNBC and ABC often and I find him too snarky and irrationally biased most of the time. We should leave irrationally biased to the republicans. They wear it so much better.
I will not pay for his site but wishing no one any ill will, I hope he succeeds.
Rockery
When was that thumbnail pic taken of him? He looks horrible
Ellipse Kirk
Well, I won’t miss his demented apologies for the Katholic church hatemongers.
Bellerophon69
Why pay for a blog? I have Queerty for that!
Daniel-Reader
He looks like the meds aren’t helping him anymore – they do eventually stop working. I’m not certain why he’s the go-to guy for anything. That whole barebacking thing was disturbing.
Cam
My problem with paying for his site are two different ones.
1. Most of his stuff is just linked or gathered from other sites which I can get here or on the news sites for free just by seeing a few ads on the side.
2. When he DOES write something, if he happens to get onto some subject that happens to be important to him it’s all you hear about. When I used to read his site he went on and on about circumcisn for weeks railing against it and screaming that parents in the U.S. needed to stop doing it etc… I got it the first 20 tiems he wrote about it, didn’t need to continually read about it for a month.
Again, I really think he overestimates how interesting he is.
Samuel
@Cam: I think Sullivan will finally realize how fiscally conservative gay internet readers are ……….
David
He is an absolute moron. You should send him back to England.