Tag: The Dish Model

by Patrick Appel

As always, it a pleasure to step in while Andrew gets some much needed rest. Guest-blogging is not all that different than my day-to-day activities on the Dish – 24 of the 50 posts currently on the front page were written by me. All the substantive posts are Andrew’s work, but it’s my and Chris’s job to read through the blogosphere and pick out the choicest bits. Andrew edits, approves, and spins what we find, but the illusion of an all-reading blogger is maintained by employing two extra sets of eyes.

I’ll be checking Andrew’s general e-mail account this week (andrew@theatlantic.com). We typically get around 450 e-mails a day, but correspondence drops significantly during Andrew’s absences. If you want to see an e-mail of yours posted to the Dish, you have a much better chance of not being overlooked if you write this week. 

Andrew will return December 21st.

A reader writes:

I read the dissent of the day about a reader's fatigue with the Palin soap opera. I agree with the reader on the subject of Palin obsession, but disagree with his threat to stop reading. The Dish covers a whole host of subjects and if I find one that doesn't interest me, like Palin drama, I skip it. We are not obligated as readers to read every post, are we? Of course not.

That's why I prefer the blogsophere to talk radio. If a talk show host goes off on a subject that I have no interest in, I'm stuck. Sure I can put on some music but my political fix is left unfulfilled. With blogs, especially this one, there is plenty to sink your mind into – at your own pace.

It's a clearing house for views and ideas and videos and art and argument and anecdote and reporting that create a community of discourse. It's as much your blog now as mine. The posts from readers are just as informative and often more enlightening than my own. Yes, I'm still writing or editing or approving almost every post, but the flow of conversation increasingly leads me, rather than my directing it. As I've noted before, I'm more of a DJ now than a traditional writer. The Dish is always sampling, re-mixing and generating its own music in the interaction with others.

I don't think about this much as I do it because I just follow my nose and pursue the intimations of this medium. But every now and again, one looks up and realizes how different the landscape is and how evolved the Dish has become. I am now just one voice among many here – a voice around which others can gather and contribute, but no more than that.

And that's much more exciting than anything one blogger can pontificate about in a vacuum.

A report from the Tech staff:

Apologies. Stay tuned.

Scott Payne understands what the Dish is trying to do, and I’m grateful for his kind words. But I should say I regret nothing about my blogging about Sarah Palin last year and would do it again – with feeling – if such a duplicitous farce of an apparatchik were to be advanced as a possible leader for the US in the future. None of the crucial factual evidence for her constant fabulisms was ever provided and the MSM, as uninterested in the truth as they are eager for their own reputations, curled up into a little ball of deference. As for my use of the term Christianist, here’s my defense of the word, from 2006:

… let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

This noxious corruption of religion is still at large. Gingrich, for example, sees it as a lynchpin for the future of the Republican coalition. And it has clearly helped delegitimize Christianity in the eyes of many who might otherwise be tempted to look at the Gospels in a more open-minded fashion. The damage these fanatics and reactionaries have done to actual faith – let alone a rational politics – is incalculable, and I’m damned if I will allow them to use the word "Christian" to describe their agenda. It isn’t.

At 2.45 pm, I’ll be answering NPR listeners’ questions live here on the Internets. Of course, you can join in.

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This week eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%. In short, online advertising will continue to expand in the recession—just not as quickly as previously expected.

And we get a fab new design to go with the new issue of the magazine (but they wouldn’t pay for a new cartoon, so you’re stuck with me and the beagles and the red-haired mystery for a while yet). This will be the last post before the new design goes up. Refresh your cache if the page seems old.

For the record, I hate redesigns, as we all do. But this redesign is one of the coolest you’ll see: a return to the style of the 1950s with a very 21st Century edge. The new issue also has a stunner of a piece by Hanna Rosin, Jeffrey Goldberg’s advice column, Fallows at his best and my first attempt to write a long-form essay about the meaning of blogging as a medium and message. The Great Michael Hirschorn too!