I gave up writing a blog itself because it made financial sense to do so. I was the “low cost” in professional blogging’s “low cost/high output” formula, and as I was able to charge more for my writing, I was able to do less of it. I don’t know the specifics of Sullivan’s financial situation, but it seems like his choice to continuing blogging for as long as he did was a stylistic choice and not a financial one. Clearly, his choice to stop blogging is a stylistic choice as well. It’s only a stylistic choice.

“Blogger” as an occupation, as a word, never made sense to me. It’s like describing one’s job as a “computer-er” or a “fire-hoser.” A blog is a tool or a medium, it’s not a thing one does. “Blogger” is an ugly, clunky word that gained currency mainly because professional journalists needed a way to differentiate their own more serious work from that of these untrained upstarts—a final act of paternalism from the gate-keeping class. Critics tried to maintain that there was something distinctive about “blogging” that made it different from “reporting,” but the years have broken down whatever point they were trying to make.

Today, it’s hard to believe that serious people held serious panels, dozens of them, debating the difference between “blogging” and “journalism,” an exercise that probably seems as incomprehensibly pointless to the average teenager today as debating the difference between a “computer” and “phone.”