The League, Here and There and Back Again
I know Mark is working on a history of the League, and Patrick and Tod and others have been doing various posts about where readers and commenters and writers and so forth all hail from and top posts and other grand delvings into the site’s whirligigs. I thought I’d say a few words.
Once upon a time I had no idea how to blog. And it really is something that takes practice. It’s not like writing an essay at school or a short story or a poem, though I do think that blogging can make you a stronger writer in all these other forms. I dabbled at tech blogging, went through a brief obsession-with-Israel phase, and then eventually struck out to blog about religion and politics from an independent’s perspective. This was only a couple years ago, but I was such a political novice it sort of galls me to even think about it. Fortunately, I’m also a quick learner. (Unfortunately I have a terrible memory.)
Anyways I stumbled on Culture 11 in fairly short order and soon picked up on the blogs of Daniel Larison, Freddie deBoer, John Schwenkler and from there to Mark’s blog and Scott Payne’s blog and soon found myself engaging these various bloggers whom I so admired in various little bloggy debates. One thing led to another, and I think it was Scott who proposed a group blog and Mark and I quickly jumped on the idea, netting Freddie and a couple other bloggers for the launch and spending days sending back and forth emails trying to settle on a name for the site.
It turned out that the launch of the blog coincided pretty perfectly with the unfortunate shuttering of Culture 11 – though this was probably good for us as I’m pretty sure we grabbed up at least a handful of their readers. Freddie had name recognition at that point also, which drew the eyeballs of some more trafficked bloggers our way.
For all the times that he has infuriated me, it was Andrew Sullivan who sent the vast bulk of our early readers in our direction. I recall not being as excited about the traffic as I was about the potential for new readers, new commenters, new points of view. And so slowly the site grew. Heady days.
And the site changed. New writers came aboard. New commenters, too. And the comment box was always our big focus. At first we tried to arrange posts into discussions or into a series of write-and-respond type posts, but that fell through pretty quickly – and I think for the best.
What eventually emerged was a community, and as we’ve brought former commenters into writing positions, that community has only grown. At no point in the history of the site has it been as interesting or as fun or as full of quality writing as it is now – at least in my humble opinion. Tod Kelly’s second date post was our highest trafficked post of all time – and for good reason. In some ways, these deeply personal stories have transcended the typical politics blog, adding a depth that I don’t think you find most places. I hope Rufus puts together that anthology soon. I think it will reflect this.
For my own part, The League has given me a place to stretch my intellectual limbs, to try on various ideological shoes and hats, to allow my ideas and my uncertainty to run wild. For the most part, this community has been receptive to my inconsistency and self-exploration in a way that many places would not have been, and it has given me a space to honestly address my doubts in a way that makes me a stronger thinker and – I believe – a stronger person.
So thank you to everyone who has stuck with us or joined up or who come and go from time to time. Thanks to the commenters and to the readers (or lurkers if you prefer, though I do not.) And thanks to the many brilliant bloggers who make this place so fascinating and powerful. This blog is one of my favorite dives of all time. We started it to start a conversation. We succeeded, I think, far beyond our hopes. The only thing it’s missing is beer on tap.
And I’m working on that, but the technology has a long ways to go.
And thanks to you, too, Erik.Report
Totally. And I haven’t forgotten our chat, I promise. I’m just irredeemably slow at getting things done these days.Report
No worries. I quite understand.Report
Actually, this is probably a better history than I am planning to write for the main site’s upcoming 3,000,000th page view. At the very least, it’s more coherent, less self-congratulatory, and less dull than what I’ve got in the works, though suddenly I have an idea for a better way of doing it than I was planning. A few factual items/clarifications:
1. It was absolutely Scott’s proposal. The title of the post proposing it was “A Blogosphere Built for Two (or Three or Four or Five….).” Alas, the Wayback Machine is only able to recover the above-the-fold portion of the post, which doesn’t really get into Scott’s original idea. I expect if we could find it, we’d see that what this place has become is pretty much exactly what he described.
2. It seems worth recalling the accidental launch of the site thanks to one of the folks at Culture11 (probably either Friedersdorf or Poulos) noticing an incoming link from here the day we started beta testing and then putting up a post announcing the site’s creation and directing everyone here. Surely it helped that every one of the originals except for the two co-bloggers I brought with me from my old site had by then written a feature piece for C11. In retrospect, it’s a good thing the cat was let out of the bag early, since if we had waited to work out the kinks before officially launching, Culture11 may well have been gone.
3. Schwenkler’s role in this site cannot be underestimated. Ever. His site not only brought you, Scott, and I together, it also introduced us to the two Wills and JL.
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Thanks very much for the clarifications. All very good points and very true. I still think Schwenkler should have come blogged here with us though.Report
Why didn’t he?Report
Stretched too thin, IIRC.Report
Thanks for the history, and really for everything, Erik. Mostly for the opportunity you gave me to start writing here. (Why you gave me that opportunity I have no idea, but thanks all the same.)
I was actually going back last night through everything that had been posted that day: Jason’s bit on education, J.L.’s musings on both Penn State and Leonard Cohen, the Penn State posting by Ryan and Mark, and especially Patrick sharing a bit of his family history.
It made me a little proud to be here.Report
You know what is preposterously, unbelievably, awesome to me about this place? I go on hiatus for, what, 3 or 4 months, pondering the possibility of having to formally retire from front page blogging? I come back for a few comments and we’ve got a largely new roster of front-pagers, but because of my hiatus, I’ve had no involvement whatsoever in that roster development. And yet within hours, I felt just as much a part of the community as I did when we first created it. Yesterday felt like it could have been a day in March 2009, just with different names on the bylines and higher comment counts.Report
And yet within hours, I felt just as much a part of the community as I did when we first created it.
That’s part of our Evil Plot. We’re going to gut you and serve you to the commentariat later, when all of your final doubts have washed away.Report
Well after we planned the sub blogs, it struck me that most of the new writers really ought to come from the commentariat, especially as some commenters joined up on the sub blogs. I have a couple more sub blogs to get started also. And we really do need some female bloggers damnit.Report
Well you kept sending me guest posts and I got tired of doing all the work…
And there was that whole part about how all those posts were really interesting and engaging that played a part as well.Report
As someone who’s been lurking here for a few years now, but doesn’t pipe up much – it’s interesting to read how this all got started. You’ve got a great blog, with terrific ensemble of writers. Keep up the good work!Report
Thanks Maxwell.Report
Honor to be a part of this, pleasure to learn more about how it all started.
And I think the League gets better every day.Report
I agree, and glad you’re on board as well.Report
Ah memories, good times.Report
This place is a little piece of heaven. I am delighted to be here. I’m delighted to have all y’all here with me.Report
Although I’m mostly ignored now, I’ve enjoyed the participants and the posts here. Y’all have done a good job.Report
What an odd thing to say. But thanks.Report
Personally, I enjoy reading your comments. More often than not, I just don’t have anything to say in response. It’s tough to convey quiet attentiveness and earnest eye-contact electronically.Report
I don’t think of you as ignored, MF. And I’m glad you have come back.Report
I just caught these comments — I wasn’t fishing for support, but I appreciate the comments — I was being a tad facetious — my style is not really open to comments, unless it’s “WTF? Are you completely mad?”Report
Wait, you mean fishing as in fishing, right?
Anyway, yeah, I read your comments too. Even though I find the 1984 avatar a bit eerie.Report
Yes, it’s intentionally eerie. Maybe that scares people off. It’s just a reminder that it could be so. Maybe I should get a puppy avatar?Report
If I fished for support, I’d be broke.Report
Teach a man to fish and he’ll be grateful forever.
Buy a man a fish, and you could all be arrested.Report
This is probably my favorite blog.
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Participating in the community here is one of the greatest pleasures of my day, and I am incredibly grateful for the privilege.Report
I confess I don’t read blogs like I used to, but I try to check in on The League every few months. The sub-blogs really seem to be humming – kudos to Erik and the rest of the gang for all their work.
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Thanks to Eric and all others involved in developing and enlarging one of my favorite daily stops on the internet. Oddly, I would have trouble describing why it is among my favorites. It just is.Report
Just a quick update on the Journal project before my monitoring software logs me out:
1. I’ve emailed some local printers and am gradually compiling quotes, including the online print-on-demand sites, to try to figure out the cheapest way to publish a League collection. I’ll let everyone know the options.
2. I’ve gone through about six months of 2010 and found a ton of posts I liked. In general, I’ve gotten each month down to about 7 or 10 posts that I really enjoyed. My idea here is to offer people selections to pick from for 2010, but I have to say I’m stunned at how solid the writing has been here. Picking out ten per month meant a lot of guilt about twenty or so other posts that were first rate. Culling this down to 7 or 8 for the year will be a monster, trust me. For that, however, everyone will get a chance to vote.Report
I was going to email you this week, but don’t have your address. Have you seen what Grantland is doing with their posts-turned-publication? It looks cool. (Though maybe expensive.)Report
No, I haven’t. I’m still trying to figure out if a book could be as cheap as a newsprint edition. It seems like a book is more aesthetically pleasing, but maybe a newsprint version would be better if we wanted to do it again. Trust me, when you start going through the posts, you’ll see what I mean about us likely wanting to do it again. It’s why I think we should think of this as “selections” instead of a “best of”- there’s a lot of stuff that won’t fit, but is just as good.Report
Okay, the gist is that the local publisher that prints all of the newspapers in this area can print what I’m looking to do for about 65 cents a copy. The problem is they require a minimum of 1,000 copies first. So, if I can find a small independent publisher, it’s possible that the cost can be relatively low without the minimum number of copies being as high.Report
Hey Rufus,
http://www1.lightningsource.com/. This is what Lulu and other print-be-demand services use. It’s pretty bare bones in the sense that there’s no ISBN or marketing or whatever, but a friend who has experiencing self-publishing an self-printing has done his research and seems to think it’s the best available.Report