I have some sad news. After nearly four years in operation, today will be the final day Open Left publishes new content.
The site will not disappear, and all published content will remain online, but after today we will cease producing new content.
As the people who founded the site, myself [Chris Bowers] included, moved on to other projects, we have gradually run out of money to maintain operations. It is a difficult decision, but we kept going for as long as we could.
Were you an Open Left regular? (I confess that I was not.) Does this leave a hole in the progblogosphere? Or will we all just keep on blogging without noticing Open Left’s silence?
Please share widely!
but not any longer, I don’t regularly go to MyDD anymore, maybe during elections. But Bowers is on kos and it seems like he sending out an email a week there.
Stuff was usually pretty good. Kind of intellectual.
he was my favorite writer on the ‘net for a long time, and when he went from MyDD to OpenLeft, I read OpenLeft for a little while, at least.
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p>It’s kind of been a shell of a website, though, because their writers there have all had their own ‘other’ jobs that outsized what OpenLeft was. I think it became unfeasible for them to keep doing all those other gigs and also make OpenLeft grow into what they initially wanted the thing to be.
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p>I think it’s a little disappointing, because the vision of what OpenLeft was supposed to be is something that’s sorely lacking in the blogosphere — true progressive advocacy, but with the analysis to put everything in context (as opposed to the hodge-podge of news stories with a progressive bent that you get at most progressive blogs), but alas. Then again, they seemed to have given up on that vision a while ago.
Up until about 2008, I found it invaluable and it had a distinctive voice on the Left. Thereafter too many posts meandered off into the outer reaches of abstraction and other sites became more central to activism.
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p>I also find TPM less compelling these days. Perhaps that will change with Republicans controlling the House.
I used to visit at least once a day — now a couple times a week. Not sure why.