Quote of the Day: Blogging Sucks!

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


From Jonathan Rauch, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan:

If some strange magnetic pulse wiped out every blog post written since the format began, hardly anything memorable or important would be lost; and, after 15 years or whatever, it’s too late to hope for maturation. The medium is the problem. The Web is great for shopping and research, but intrinsically lousy for serious reading and writing. Over the past decade and more, the most striking fact about the blogosphere is how little it has produced of distinction or durability.

Oh yeah, that’s going to go over well. It’s pretty much true, of course, since your average blog post is about as durable as a story in a daily newspaper, and you know what they say about yesterday’s news, don’t you? It’s also pretty much true of the weekly column writing business, though I suppose you can at least collect those in a book and pretend that they’ve found immortality that way.

Of course, some mediums are designed for posterity and some are designed to help readers make sense of the daily grind in real time. I hope Rauch hasn’t gotten the two mixed up.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2024 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate