Maggie's Farm

Doc's Gossip Column:

Ed Morrissey is closing down Captain's Quarters and joining HotAir? He's going from a prestigious, intellectual site to one where they use 'Dude' as the headline for every fourth article?

Not everyone is pleased.

First, there goes our daily 'Day by Day'. It's on a lot of sites in a small, single-frame format, but it's a bother to do and something's lost when you have to work your way through it, rather than just reading over it. It took up a lot of valuable web site space, but Ed deserves credit for displaying the full panel. Gonna miss it.

Second, putting an essayist like Ed on a links site is kind of mixing formats, no? On HotAir, we like two insightful lead-in paragraphs, then cut to the video. I'm not so sure the crowd over there is ready to digest 19 paragraphs on the inner workings of the Pakistani government.

We also have a small 'clash of cultures' in the making as Ed drags the CQ crowd over to HotAir. The HotAir gang coincides with Ace's and is a rowdy, shoot-from-the-hip bunch. By the very nature of the beast, the commenters on CQ are a more sedate, thoughtful crowd. Like I said, culture clash in the making.

Best guess is that Michelle is pushing it in the direction of RealClearPolitics, which has both essays and links, but there's a small problem. The essays on RCP are both long and serious. The links are just that -- bare links.

The problem is that essayists and 'quippers', like the gang at HotAir, really don't mix. You'll have two long, serious articles next to each other, then some two-paragraph, semi-nonsensical, possibly satirical, no-doubt demeaning intro to a Britney Spears video clip. It devalues the serious articles, and, on the flip side, the serious articles put one in too serious a mood to enjoy a flippant video clip. If it keeps going in this direction (that is, if she hires on another essayist), at some point the decision will have to be made to make the site serious-only, and that'd be a real shame.

Of course, the real tragedy is that Ed's voice will get lost in the shuffle. 90 million blogsites, remember. The CQ crowd won't think the HotAir site is serious enough and many will eventually drop the daily link. And the HotAir crowd will take one look at the length of Ed's latest missive, gulp audibly, and hit the 'Back' button.

On the other hand, to be fair, I'm happy for him. He's had a pretty rough few years, what with his wife's medical problems, the pressures of blogging fame and having to be 'smart' every day, fighting off the spammers in the comments area, and that's not to mention all of the usual nightmares in life, like equipment failing, the car breaking down, the roof leaking, and all the rest.

So it'll be nice for ol' Ed to kick back a little and leave the driving to Greyhound. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Thanks for listening. :)