It Takes A Village: An Interview with Patrick Appel

Given the kerfuffle happening at The Daily Dish over Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner’s involvement in the production of the blog, I thought this interview would both be timely and of interest. I had originally planned to present the interview as a profile piece on Patrick himself, who I have understood for some time as playing a key role in the production of the Daily Dish but who, for obvious reasons, tends not to receive a ton of public acknowledgment for that work. The interview was intended as an insider look at how The Daily Dish, arguably the most popular political blog currently active, is updated on a day-to-day basis.

As it turns out, Andrew’s recent break and an off-the-cuff comment by Patrick brought the blog’s operation into focus. As such, I decided to scrap my plans for a profile piece over the holiday break and post the answers Patrick had kindly provided  as a straightforward interview. I’m doing so because Patrick went into a fair amount of detail about the production of The Daily Dish as well as his own involvement with the  blog. Anyone who has taken an interest in how Andrew is personally involved in the blog and to what degree Chris and Patrick are involved would do well to take ten minutes to read through the interview. Many questions are, I think, clarified as a result.

It’s worth noting that Patrick agreed to do the interview back in late August and the email correspondence that forms the interview took place between mid-September and mid-October, a good two months before this blogospheric controversy took shape. Patrick mentions this once or twice, but I will re-emphasize that he does not speak for Andrew Sullivan in any way throughout the course of the interview. Patrick offers insights into Andrew’s style of blogging and what it is like to be intimately involved in his blog, but the perspective offered is his own.

Finally, I’d like to take one more opportunity to thank Patrick for corresponding with me over the course of a month despite one of the blogosphere’s most harrowing schedules – his participation was both engaging and appreciated.

Scott: How did you first get involved in assisting with the production of the Daily Dish?

Patrick: I interned for the Atlantic in the Fall of 2007. Andrew’s former assistant, Jessie Roberts, returned to Columbia to finish her degree just as my internship was ending, and Andrew asked me to take her place.

At first, I sent Andrew morning memos consisting of thirty or forty URLs to blog posts of interest. After several months of this, he asked me start saving blog posts as drafts. Every day Chris Bodenner (Andrew’s other assistant) and I draft between twenty and thirty posts. Andrew then approves, rewrites, or deletes these posts. We’ve created a blogging labor line of sorts.

Scott: Can you run me through an average day for you?

Patrick: I get up around 8 am, check Memeorandum, and skim new items in my RSS reader until about 10 am. As I’m reading, I open around fifty posts in tabs for closer inspection. I then read through those tabs, delete most of them, and draft the best. According to Google Reader, I have 1,086 blogs in my RSS reader and have read 16,070 posts in the last 30 days. This is down from a high of about 32,000 posts during the height of the election. The blogs are sorted into different categories: politics, right partisans, left partisans, science, economics, pop culture, and so on. Depending upon the news of the day, I will focus on one folder or another. I’ll also look through the 450 or so e-mails that the Dish inbox gets everyday. I draft posts steadily until noon or 1 pm and break for lunch.

After lunch, I’ll take care of any other Dish related work I might have and then I return to reading. At this point, I will usually draft a half dozen posts for the weekend. We try to bank most of the weekend in advance, which requires finding posts and articles that will still feel fresh a couple of days down the road. Weekends consist of magazine articles, science writing, religion, out of the way pop culture items, and other fairly timeless posts. After that, I will check back in with the news of the day and will start blogging up the next morning. At 6 pm or 7 pm, I break for dinner. After dinner, I will usually return to the blog and finish scheduling posts for the next morning. Depending upon the tempo of the news, I work anywhere from ten to fourteen hours a day.

Scott: In drafting those posts, is there something that could be considered a SOP or guiding philosophy that you, Chris, and Andrew share in terms of determining what types of information make the cut to be considered as drafts and those that don’t?

Patrick: There is no standard operating procedure. Each of us has his own interests, but everything is approved by Andrew, and filtered through his frontal cortex, so his sensibility dominates. By this point, the mind meld is near completion, and I’ve an intuitive sense what Andrew will and won’t post. Only around one percent of what I read makes it to draft form. NYU professor Clay Shirky has written how anytime the costs associated with the means of producing information are lowered, such as when the printing press was invented or the internet came to be, the amount of useless noise exponentially increases but so does the absolute amount of worthwhile content. A large part of the value we produce is based upon what we don’t post.

A few of the questions I ask myself when pondering whether to link to a post containing political opinion: is the writer intellectually honest? Is the post timely? Is the writer an expert on the subject? Is the perspective new and original? Would I want someone else to bring this post to my attention? Does this post help me better understand the news of the day? Does the post help me better understand a political, economic, scientific or philosophical concept? Is is accessible and well written? Does it help me understand an ideological viewpoint?

Filtering the news is more art than science, and each of these questions depend upon particulars. One example: timeliness is important because content on the web has an extremely short half-life. We are most likely not going to write about a day-old New York Times article, no matter how brilliant, because everyone has already seen it, but a magazine article that has been online for a few weeks might still be fresh enough to consider. A YouTube or Vitmeo video with 500,000 views is probably too dated to post even if it is two days old. A week-old post by a highly trafficked blog has probably already been picked over, but a week-old post by an obscure blogger might still be new enough. Timeliness has more to do with how many readers have already seen a given item than how recent it is.

My job requires understanding the contours of various debates. We will usually try to air every side of an argument until straw men on both sides of a given issue have been demolished and only the strongest opposing arguments remain. Most political arguments are not original: they are a regurgitation of dusty talking points. Pinpointing where the debates over the Iraq War or global warming or marriage equality currently stand requires understanding what has come before and what new tread of the debate has legs. We try to locate the newest and best thoughts both in favor and against the Dish’s positions and then we struggle towards clarity.

Scott: What kind of interaction do you, Chris, and Andrew tend to have over a given day?

Patrick: There isn’t much direct communication.

We might trade a few e-mails throughout the day, and if Andrew is in the office he and I will often touch in, but when he is in ptown we sometimes go weeks without talking. Seeing what Chris and Andrew post and adjusting my searching accordingly is its own form of communication. Chris and I are housemates, so I see a good deal of him, but all three of us can do our jobs independently.

When I first started, Andrew would give me daily or semi-daily feedback. By this point both Chris and I don’t need much guidance.

Scott: You’ve been pretty up front about you disagreements with some of Andrew’s positions, specifically I’m thinking about the Trig Palin issue. Do those disagreements cause any tension in the “blogging line”? How do you tend to deal with those disagreements and how does Andrew (if you can speak for him on that front). Do those types of disagreements ever fuel internal debate within the production if the blog that provides a beneficial outcome?

Patrick: Andrew has always celebrated disagreement. This predates the Dish.

When he published The Bell Curve in The New Republic, he also published an issue’s worth of articles countering Charles Murray. Whether I agree or disagree with Andrew on a given topic, I will hunt down the best counterarguments and sort through the best reader dissents so that he has to confront the strongest arguments against his position.

Features like Dissent Of The Day are the core of the Dish’s identity, and this encouragement of open debate has been hugely beneficial to both our readers and our operation. Its in Andrew’s nature to seek out opposing viewpoints, and my disagreeing with him over various issues has made him respect me more, not less.

Scott: What is your relationship with the readers like without an open comments section. And is there a specific reason why the Dish doesn’t provide for comments directly?

Patrick: The original reason that the Dish didn’t have comments was because when the blog launched almost a decade ago it wasn’t clear whether a blogger was responsible for libel in the comments section. After it was established that a blogger is not legally culpable for comments, Andrew thought about adding them. Last year we polled our readers and they voted two to one against comments. Here are the reasons they gave.

Interacting with readers through e-mail is more personal than a comments section. This is described in greater detail here and here. Selecting e-mails allows one to turn down the vitriol and present the best arguments on both sides of a debate. It’s impossible to read all the mail, so good points sometimes get overlooked, but the system generally works and the readers seem to like it. It’s also very difficult to create a decent comments section on a large general interest blog for the reasons laid out here.

Scott: What is the most rewarding aspect of working to produce the Dish for you?

Patrick: It’s hard for me to pick just one aspect. Besides the pleasure of working with Chris and Andrew, being paid to stay informed is hard to beat. The job is a continual education, and even though my schedule is fairly regular, I wake up every morning not knowing what we are going to write about that day. Sometimes the Dish feels like reverse reporting. We publish and then the e-mails pour in; the sources come to us. Harnessing a few hundred thousand reader intellects is awe inspiring and humbling.

Scott: Andrew has sometimes commented in regards to things that people write about the Dish, “So-and-so understands what the Dish is trying to do.” In your own words, what would you say the Dish is “trying to do”?

Patrick: I assume you are talking about this post in particular. I can’t speak for Andrew but among the most important parts of Andrew’s philosophy is its openness to change. He won’t admit mistakes in judgment easily (I don’t think any of us do) but he will eventually relent if proven wrong. The Conservative Soul deals at length with this topic. One of the prevailing criticisms of Andrew is that he flips political allegiance, but I see this as a strength rather than a weakness. Unless you are a partisan who wants to marinate in opinions you agree with, reading places like the Corner or Daily Kos can be mind-numbingly boring. You know how those blogs will respond to an event before you click over. It’s still good to read them to take the temperature of the partisans, but knee-jerk opposition or support makes me trust those sources less because they will twist the facts to fit their agenda.

Look at the presidential nominees Andrew has supported since coming to the country: Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Dole, Bush II, Kerry, Obama. Andrew holds strong opinions, but he will not write something he does not believe. Changing his mind has consequences; he lost half to three quarters of his readership when he turned against the Iraq War. A lesser blogger wouldn’t have risked offending the ideologues. When reading certain pundits (Bill Kristol springs to mind) it’s hard to tell if they actually hold the positions they are advancing or whether they are trying to curry favor and provide political cover. Andrew writes what he thinks, sometimes to a fault.

The Dish is also trying to re-invent the magazine online. Everything is run through the prism of Andrew Sullivan’s mind, but we try to include a diversity of opinion. Every time you visit the Dish you should be able to find links to writers you agree with and to writers you disagree with. Andrew’s opinion thus becomes a reference point rather than the final word. In his long essay on blogging Andrew describes himself as a disk jockey mixing together different tracks. We blur the line between low and high culture and between politics and everything else. We treat the reader like a complete person rather than someone only interested in theology or foriegn policy or stupid cat videos. These categories are not mutually exclusive; understanding psychology and neurology can help one understand the cognitive biases at play in politics. A writer’s thoughts on theology and free will tends to inform that writer’s political philosophy. Mental Health Breaks and the fun culture posts balance out the serious stuff. The candy coating helps the medicine go down.

A blog is an echo chamber if you design it that way and it is an education machine it you can bear to keep your mind open to the best arguments of your opponents. Tyler Cowen makes a related point here. The blogosphere has also made it possible to mechanize serendipity. There are only so many hours in the day to read news stories, blog posts, and watch youtube videos, but on the internet your readers and other bloggers do much of that reading for you and the best content tends to trickle up. The Dish is trying to become a go-to place for intelligent debate online, to suck the marrow out of the hive mind of the blogosphere.

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