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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

It must be because I wrote a post about Survivor
Posted by Jill | 7:22 PM
No, wait. He says he wants to do more writing about culture. So maybe David Sirota is planning to cover the next Survivor bromance so I don't have to:
So a brief programming note: May 31st, 2009 will be my last day as a full-time political blogger, and, really, my last day as a full-time political writer of any sort. This is (obviously) a major change for me.

After long discussions/deliberations with various members of my trusted Kitchen Cabinet (which includes, among others, Chris Bowers), I'm making a bunch of career moves/adjustments, admittedly very quickly and very abruptly (that's how I roll, I guess). If you care what this means - whether because you are interested in my work, in OpenLeft in general, or just out of voyeuristic pleasure - read on. If you don't care, skip this post, move on, and try, if you can, to control your desire to snipe in the comments section.

From May 31st to June 17th, I will be Mostly Off the Grid on stateside trips to conferences (the America's Future Now conference in particular) and at the Jersey Shore with family. From June 18th to July 12th, I will be Completely Off the Grid in China. When I get back, I will no longer be employed by the Campaign for America's Future and my role here at OpenLeft will be reduced to the Morning Blogger - that is, I will be posting one post a day in the morning, and that's it. Additionally, I am curtailing most of - and likely all of - my direct political activism indefinitely.

I will continue to write my syndicated column, my upcoming new book, and monthly articles for In These Times, all of which I expect to be far less hard-core political and far-more cultural than my previous writing. It's not that I won't write about politics - it's just that I will look to mix it up a lot more.

To that end, I am slowly working on a new non-political project that (depending on how much I like it, and how well I can pull it off) may hit the Internet sometime in the mid to late summer. Additionally, I will continue to host the drive-time morning show on KKZN AM760 here in Colorado from 6am-10am every weekday until regular host Jay Marvin comes back - and I will continue to host the show in a way that mixes politics, pop culture, entertainment and technology.

So, when June 1st comes, and you don't see me around here for a month and a half and then when you do see me it's only on a limited basis, it's not because I'm dead and gone (at least I hope not) - it's because I'm Audi 5000.

The reason for this change is fairly simple: I'm in need of something more creative, and I want to get back to the basics of writing. It is my passion, it is what I love - and I am interested in more than just the hard-core political world, whose media (blogospheric/magazines/TV shows/etc.) and activist outlets in the Dear Leader Era I believe are becoming less and less creative, more and more sycophantic, and ultimately, completely unstimulating.

I say that with an asterisk, though - and that asterisk is In These Times and OpenLeft. Those are two of the few places where I think generally creative and bold-thinking writing is still being done - by journalists, front-pagers, diarists and commenters. That's why, in fact, I am going to keep writing on a limited basis for both.


All this proves that Pat Paulsen was right: One man's junk is another man's prune danish.

I had a brief subscription to the paper version of In These Times after attending 2007 Yearly Kos, and OpenLeft is, as you know, under the category of "Heathers" in the blogroll -- sites to whom I don't link because of their blogelitism (And yes, I hereby coin that phrase). It isn't that I'm sour grapesy about not being among the blogelite (yeah, I coin that one too, even if it does sound like a nightlight marketed by Telebrands on a 4 AM infomercial). At this point I'm perfectly OK with being a cube rat with a red stapler (yes really) during the day, collecting a good paycheck, blogging during stolen moments in the mornings and evenings, and not having to worry how I'm going to pay the rent. It's the sheer hubris in anointing these two sites as the ONLY resources for "creative and bold-thinking writing."

David Sirota has obviously never read Driftglass. Or Ornery Bastard. Or the Great and Wondrous Minstrel Boy, DCap, AK Muckraker, or Marcy Wheeler, who has almost singlehandedly kept the Bush Administration's horrific torture policy on the front burner, or any of the many other wonderful bloggers you can read by clicking the links in our blogroll -- most of whom will never appear on Rachel Maddow's show or have entourages surrounding them if they are in Pittsburgh this July for Netroots Nation (I won't be, alas -- I have four clinical studies assigned to me because I am so badass).

I've always liked Sirota's work, but this is the kind of Alpha Dog Blogger, self-righteous, supercilious, snooty crap that made me create the "Heathers" link in the first place. I wish him success in whatever he decides to do, but as someone with eight years of movie reviews out there in the Wayback machine, I can tell you that writing about culture gets as tiresome as writing about politics does.

But with any luck at all, Sirota's departure will create an opening for one of the many talented bloggers who have been toiling away in obscurity for nearly a decade, preferably someone who recognizes that quality and popularity are not always the same thing.

After all, American Idol is popular too.

(h/t)

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