You may well have guessed this was the case: After 12+ years, our co-founder, co-editor, and great friend David Kravitz has moved on from the blog.
Here is his statement:
If you had told me back in 2004, when we started Blue Mass Group, that it would still be a vibrant online community in 2017, with nearly 20 million recorded page views, and with thousands of users having contributed tens of thousands of posts, I’d have said you were out of your mind. I’m very proud of what BMG has achieved, and I look forward to watching it continue to grow in the years to come in our ever-evolving social media landscape. As I move on to new challenges, I want to thank BMG’s editors, users, and readers from the bottom of my heart, and to wish them all the very best.
Bob, Hester, and Charley are extremely grateful for what he built, maintained, and contributed here. Aside from his sharp and humane insights, David did a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes, maintaining the site and its operations.
At his request, that’s all we’re going to say about his departure.
David is plainly irreplaceable. But we need to think ahead about what this online community — strengthened by offline ties and relationships — can offer to the Commonwealth and the nation going forward. The political world vis-a-vis the internet has changed drastically in the last 12 years. We used to fill a gap in the online world, especially in Massachusetts politics; with a sense that if we didn’t say it, no one else would do it for us. Now, with Twitter and Facebook et al, practically everyone is “blogging.” We are inundated with opinion … not all of it high-quality. (A 140 character limit and a dopamine-hit appetite is a recipe for misunderstanding. Twitter is good for linking … but bad for thinking, as the President has conclusively established.)
We think, we hope, that BMG still has an important role to play. We have tried, imperfectly of course, to cultivate a culture of respectful, informative, “reality-based” discussion. There is contentious and fractious debate happening within the left and left-center. To win power, we need to reach beyond the traditional left, which in the age of Trump seems like a tantalizing possibility. Can progressives coalesce, and even appeal to some Trump voters disaffected by the money-politics and the downward mobility of the last generation? Can we use this massive setback as a slingshot to progress?
And on the state level, we have political paralysis: a Governor with seemingly invulnerable popularity, and a small-c conservative, tepidly cautious Speaker-for-Life. But massive challenges of inequality, cost of living, housing, racism, tax justice, environment and transportation remain. If the economy slows, people still can’t get to work on time, and we face crushing budget cuts due our own intransigence and Trumpism at the federal level … this will not hold. “Political capital” has a half-life best measured in months.
Under the circumstances, we still need a place where people can talk to each other with an expectation of civility and good faith. The stakes for cohesion and coalition on the left are extremely high right now.
We would like BMG to be useful to that end. We would like to continue to be the “water cooler” for Massachusetts political discussion, and perhaps to emphasize doing as much as talking — the site as an ancillary, not a replacement, for offline political action. We can tie into the Indivisibles and SwingLefts; hearings and legislation; issue campaigns and protests; primaries and elections.
We humbly solicit your advice and suggestions, thinking broadly, for how the site can better serve the community. Your editors run the site on volunteer time, too; and we recognize the occasional tension between keeping an institution running, and actually working towards its stated goals.
How could the site be better for you?
Good luck David! Thank you for all your hard work, and your generosity.
My well wishes and thanks to with David in his next great adventure. As to suggestions? I liked being able to tweet or post directly to facebook. I am also willing to make myself useful. While orthopedic issues have slowed down my hips and knees, my fingers and brain are doing just fine.
There was a while on a previous platform where allowing posts to FB and Twitter slowed the site way down. If that can be avoided, then great.
David, thank you for your hard work, vision, and commitment to progressive values. What you and your partners built at BMG has had a tremendously positive impact on grassroots politics in MA. We all owe you a big debt of gratitude for your dedication to these values.
Good luck in your next endeavor!
I’ll just start by saying thanks to David! I will miss his policy insights, legal analysis, and laser like focus on questioning the assumptions of our own side. His questions on my posts and comments have helped make me a better writer and I hope, a better contributor to this site. It was also great to meet him in person and have some fun times over great brews. I know he will still be making a great impact be on the front lines of the fight.
And thanks to the editors-this was my political home away from home for the many years I was living in Chicago and I would not have been able to do the work I briefly did with Evan Falchuk and his organization without the skills I first honed here.
I think moving forward we should focus more on state and local races, I think that coverage had lapsed in the wake of the endless 2016 campaign. Reporting on state and local level policy issues and really using this site as an incubator for those kinds of ideas. And getting more public officials to come back here and interact with folks.
I also think the site has a bit of an identity crisis. For many it is a progressive site focused on progressive policy issues. But there is also a strong community of active DTC and DSC members who focus on a lot of inside baseball issues I simply don’t have the time or patience to understand. I would like those folks to open up their communities with tutorials or primers so that we can all play the inside/outside game a bit better. And they should treat us outsiders with charity and patience. Not everyone was here was around for the fights against Ed King-and maybe you can learn from our tactics as much as we can learn from yours.
More direct coordination with Our Revolution, Progressive Mass, and other social justice movements. Our blog is too white, too male, and skews to an older and more suburban crowd. There is a ton of movement in Somerville and Cambridge around electing young, progressive candidates of color and almost none of my friends in those efforts know of this site or engage with it. I think there is a huge lapse in coverage for the Boston mayoral and city council races and the kinds of communities working on those efforts. I’ve started inviting friends from those communities to participate in this one.
More offsite activity-I’ll be back in August and eager to meet at Saloon and around the state. And I will be active on Sumbuls campaign and the 2018 ballot questions. Other canvassing and issue based engagement could be a way to bridge the divides and bring the community together to do good work.
These are ideas-and I know it’ll require more time and money than the editors might have. Expanding this community to include more voices, more diversity, and more offsite engagement are the key goals. And returning to a Mass focus.
There’s no question I’m one of the institutionalists you refer to. That is much more where my strength and comfort lie. I hope my information has been helpful because I see it as the key way to translate progressive desires into actual electoral change. After all, laws are made by those who are politically successful. I know I occasionally roll my eyes when it seems like someone didn’t look very hard for information (That may be the teacher in me after a day of kids whining for help to find answers right in front of them.), but I really am happy to answer questions and want to expand the party tent.
David, it has been an honor to know you these past five years. My best wishes as you embark on your next adventure. Good luck !
The new platform IMO still has some kinks. I’d like to be able rate comments and know who has rated posts. I also don’t like that nesting stops after a couple of layers. It would also be cool if David could continue to contribute from time to time.
I think the main thing the site needs is wider participation.
It seems to me that David and the rest of the crew have succeeded in all of their main goals: to build a progressive community online, to strive for civility while striking a markedly different tone than that of the great orange Kos, to promote the art of badinage. I have to wonder what David will do next.
Always remember the blimp, the triumph of Deval Patrick, and Guy Glodis’s graphic demonstration of the critical role of proofreaders.
I hope David will check back in from time to time. God speed.
David, we appreciate all the work you have done here and the work you are doing at your new gig!
Thanks, David!