April 9, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Atlanta
Blogging has evolved into an intense, rapid-fire medium—and it’s not for the faint of heart, the journalist Andrew Sullivan told the roughly 1,450 people gathered here for the Nonprofit Technology Conference.
“It’s a little like movie zombies,” he told the audience. “They used to be kind of clumsy, lumbering, and slow, but now they come at you really, really fast.”
It’s important to understand that a blog is not a publication, but rather a broadcast, said Mr. Sullivan, whose 10-year-old blog, The Daily Dish, is read by a million people a month.
“It has to change, ideally at a very brisk pace,” he said. “The brisker the pace, the more engaged the readership, and the more obsessive-compulsive the entire co-dependent relationship becomes.”
Mr. Sullivan said that any blog that isn’t updated at least once an hour was at “an incredible disadvantage,” a statement that drew several audible gasps from the audience.
Building Readership
The immediacy of the Internet combined with the intimacy of blogging creates the possibility of extraordinary moments of dialogue and community among readers, Mr. Sullivan told the audience.
Right after the murder of George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed late-term abortions, Mr. Sullivan wrote a post decrying the crime, but also expressing his personal and moral objections to the procedure.
A reader responded, describing the agonizing decision that she had had to make when she found out the child she was carrying had a fatal birth defect. Her letter prompted other readers to share their own stories.
Those type of experiences happen all the time, when in the “rawness” of a shocking or jolting event, people turn to the Internet to express themselves, said Mr. Sullivan.
“But the only way of marshalling those moments, not in a cheap or tawdry way, but really marshalling them, is by already having established the relationship with the readers of your site,” he said.
On the Internet, people relate to the individual voice, and for charities to develop deep ties with their online supporters, they have to let go of the need to control the message, Mr. Sullivan told conference participants.
“If you have a cause, if you have a subject that you’re trying to promote, find a really interesting person who can channel their own view and develop readership,” he said. “That’s the kind of readership that comes back every day. They’re not going to come back to an institution every day.”
