The revolving door between digital and legacy media is still spinning.
On Friday, New York magazine announced that Andrew Sullivan, an online news pioneer and founder of The Daily Dish, will be joining its staff as a contributing editor. From his vantage point as a feature writer, Sullivan will cover the Democratic and Republican conventions with a broader remit toward culture and politics.
Sullivan is just the latest digital whiz lured by a legacy stalwart in recent years. As magazines and newspapers seek to bolster their digital acumen, many have scoured the ranks of online news organizations for Web-native talent.
The pattern has repeated itself time and again: POLITICO, which produces high-metabolism digital journalists, has been fodder for recruiters from the likes of CNN and The Washington Post. Editors at The New York Times have raided Deadspin and The Awl Network to find Web-savvy writers, and online talent from Digital First Media’s Thunderdome (itself a legacy initiative) found homes at TIME, the New York Daily News and The Guardian.
The transition is a familiar one for Sullivan, who edited the New Republic for five years in the 90s and contributed to The New York Times Magazine from 1996 to 2002. Sullivan’s Daily Dish, a hyper-kinetic clearinghouse for its founder’s musings and reportage, was a path-breaking model for subscriber-based journalism that eventually folded in 2015.
