September 02, 2002
Seriously without Joke, SatireWire is Over!
I started the site (originally called The FNwire) back in December of 1999, at the height of the Internet boom. It was a great creative outlet, and it was a marvelous way for me to get a wider audience for my writing. That first month, for those first few stories, I think I had about 400 visitors. Last month, in July of 2002, the site had about 1 million visitors reading about 5 million stories. So, oddly enough...Sadly, this website is my favourite for a while. One of its stories appeared on this site is Does Young American Know the Country they Attacked? (in July 2002 post), a provocating question about American young perspective. So, pretty clear, i really hope (surely you), there will be any website like that, more genius and laughing.
It's not about the money. The site actually makes money — through advertising, through the book "Economy of Errors," and (primarily) through selling pieces from the site to publications like, say, the Washington Post, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, or the National Post in Canada. Nice little setup, actually. I've been very lucky. But the bottom line is, it has ceased to be fun. My heart is not in it. My head is not in it. (And please, no emails saying, "Yeah, lately we could kinda tell." Like I need to hear that.)
The thing is, SatireWire, successful as it has been, is also suffocating. I work best tangentially, meaning I work best when I let ideas just come at me, flitting about my head like confetti as I marvel at all the pretty colors, the way they turned in the wind. I would pick out the ones I liked, put them together, make a story. But the confetti no longer falls. It's all on the ground now. The parade is over. I'm just sweeping up ideas off the pavement. And that's not good enough.
Posted at September 02, 2002 06:03 PM | Web
