Andrew Sullivan to shut down The Dish

The other shoe has dropped in political blogger Andrew Sullivan's recent decision to stop blogging. He announced today, with his partners, that their blog The Dish will close down rather than limp into an uncertain future without Sullivan. "This is not as sudden a decision as it may appear from the outside," Sullivan writes. "Since last summer, we’ve been thinking through whether a transition to a Sully-free Dish could work, and what it would take to re-launch the Dish as simply an aggregation/curation news and opinion site, who would run it, who would write for it, etc."

We’ve talked to potential investors; we’ve discussed how it would work editorially; we’ve gone through the numbers; we’ve assessed exactly how heavy a lift it might be. And we concluded it would be a very, very heavy lift. The tipping point was my health, which made a core decision for me (and us) last month, as our auto-renewals loomed. We’re all only human. At some point, the marathon has to end….

We’re a tiny team, already stretched beyond any sane life/work balance, with no financial backer, and a work ethic that might be alternately described as manic or masochistic. I’m not the only one exhausted and drained after years and years of intense, always-on-deadline work – not just editorially, but also these past two years in running a small business. We’re a very tight ship as we are, with a drained crew. The seas ahead would be extremely rough, and the danger of sinking without a captain quite high. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved, which is why, in some ways, we’d rather end it while it’s still thriving than run the risk of seeing it all slowly fall apart. We owe that to the Dish itself, to ourselves and to you.