Beyond Andrew Sullivan: Journalists and the Race for Self-Promotion

When blogger Andrew Sullivan began urging readers to support his online venture, I could hear journalists everywhere slapping their foreheads and saying:

Hey, why don’t I try that?

Lots o’ luck.

But all the chatter about whether Sullivan can get his followers to part with $19.99 a year to read his provocative posts on politics and life misses the larger point. He is doing what most journalists must do to survive in this digital age, and that is building a personal brand.

Sure, few are as well known, as prolific, and as possessed of sheer writing talent—not to mention a taste for picking fights—as Andrew. But in ways that are starting to look inescapable, he is determined to turn his relationship with readers into cash flow.

First, the back story. Sullivan, a former editor of the New Republic, was blogging’s first breakout star a dozen years ago, when the term was still associated with strange people in their pajamas. I followed him closely because I was, at the time, the first blogger at the Washington Post.

Sullivan has since taken his Dish site to Time, the Atlantic and, most recently, the Daily Beast, where I work. His decision to leave the Beast when his contract expired at the end of 2012 has drawn plenty of attention—especially since he says he’s already raised $440,000 from his fans.

“We felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism,” Sullivan writes. He plans to use the money not only for himself but to pay his small staff.

As a British, Catholic, gay writer with HIV who has morphed from a conservative intellectual to an Obama-boosting intellectual, Sullivan crosses lots of lines and has an unusually passionate following. He isn’t putting most of his content behind a pay wall, so he’s essentially asking folks to pay up out of loyalty. And he doesn’t plan to accept advertising.

In a very real sense, though, most journalists these days are advertising themselves (and yours truly is no exception).

When you see them on Twitter, posting thoughts and witticisms and links to their work, they are doing more than representing their employers in public. They are promoting themselves.

When they pop up in cable news segments, or on radio shows, sounding off about their stories, or just sounding off, they are promoting themselves.

Read more at CNN.com