Andrew Sullivan, the blogger who announced in January that he was hanging up his blogger hat, has new confessionals. When he first announced that he was quitting his site, The Dish, he said it was simply time to move on after 15 years, that he wanted to write a book, think and hang out with his husband, who has called himself a “blog widow.”
It’s March. In other words, it’s about time for some new press.
In a new story in CNN Money, Sullivan is once again opening up about his life plans and his reasons for leaving the blogging world in the dust.
“The truth is, I had to stop primarily because it was killing me,” Sullivan said Sunday night at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, as reported by Tom Kludt, formerly of Talking Points Memo.
Sullivan called his workload “crushing.”
He said he missed spending time with people in the flesh.
“Here’s what I would say: I spent a decade of my life, spending around seven hours a day in intimate conversation with around 70,000 to 100,000 people every day,” Sullivan said. “And inevitably, for those seven hours or more, I was not spending time with any actual human being, with a face and a body and a mind and a soul.”
This is kind of old-new-media putting new media in its place. Or, at least it seems that way.
While praising himself, he knocks BuzzFeed down a peg or five.
“I’m intensely proud of having 30,000 subscribers to a site, which is 30,000 more than BuzzFeed will ever have,” Sullivan said. “That’s my one response to BuzzFeed. When you get 30,000 people willing to pay you 40 bucks a year to read this, then my hat’s off to you.”
So don’t expect Sullivan to turn up at BuzzFeed.
Or HuffPost. Because he cracked on that site too.
He made fun of Arianna Huffington for being so excited about the site’s 176 million unique visitors last month. He complimented a young HuffPoster who didn’t understand what that meant.
“You are the smartest kid here,” Sullivan told him. “It means nothing really.”
The Mirror sought comment from BuzzFeed on the aforementioned degrading of the site. No comment was forthcoming by press time.
In the meantime, don’t expect prose from Sullivan on the 2016 presidential race — it’s apparently not happening.
He says he will never write about the Bushes or the Clintons again.
Never is a long time. Of course, maybe he spoke too soon.