"Basically, we've gotten a third of a million dollars in 24 hours, with close to 12,000 paid subscribers (at last count). On average, readers paid almost $8 more than we asked for," Mr. Sullivan wrote this afternoon. "To say we're thrilled would obscure the depth of our gratitude and relief."

Yesterday, Mr. Sullivan asked for a pre-payment of $19.99 to become a subscriber--although he encouraged a larger contribution. So far, so good. Mr. Sullivan is "gob-smacked" by the support.

"If our goal was an annual income of somewhere around $900K (we erred on the safe side), we have gotten a third of the way there in 24 hours, which is why we're all somewhat gob-smacked," wrote Mr. Sullivan. "We feared it would take far longer for us to get that kind of support."

$19.99 for a year of content isn't that much. As Mr. Sullivan helpfully pointed out, it's only about a nickel a day.

But it got us thinking. What are some of the print publications one could get delivered for that price (or less) per year?

• Harper's Magazine is $16.97
• The Atlantic costs $14.95
• The National Review costs $19.95
• Vanity Fair is $15
• Vogue $19.99 for both print and digital, $14.99 for just print.
• Wired with tablet access is $19.99. Without tablet access (for the old-fashioned techie) is $14.99. Plus a free T-Shirt.
• Money is $14.95 for a year

But money isn't everything. Andrew Sullivan's "biased & balanced" The Dish will not have ads. And it is a chance to "[figure] out how to make journalism work in the new media world," wrote Mr. Sullivan. And, as said, "it's a pretty good investment."

The staff of The Dish. (Photo credit: AndrewSullivan)

New year, new business model for Andrew Sullivan. Mr. Sullivan is leaving the office he rarely visited and taking his Dish blog rogue. Instead of the blog living on The Daily Beast, Mr. Sullivan and his band of editors will set up an independent company called Dish Publishing LLC and publish without the benefit of a larger publication's umbrella, he announced in a blog post today.

Mr. Sullivan, one of The Beast's highest-profile names, is taking the gamble that his brand is strong enough to strike out on its own.

"Here's the core principle: we want to create a place where readers - and readers alone - sustain the site," he wrote. "No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way."

As of February 1, The Dish will revert to its old URL, www.andrewsullivan.com and establish a membership model in which readers pay for his content. A yearly subscription to The Dish will be $19.99 a year, although readers are welcome to give more. Andrew Sullivan's blog will be on The Daily Beast for the next month, and Mr. Sullivan wrote that he has Tina Brown and Barry Diller's blessing.

"In fact, Tina and Barry have been fully supportive of this decision once we made it, although we're all sad to part ways," Mr. Sullivan wrote.

Indeed, Ms. Brown tweeted the news: "Andrew Sullivan boldly strikes off on his own. Sad to see him go, but wishing @SullyDish all the best!"

The move is reminiscent of Glen Beck leaving Fox News and, of course, comes on the heels of Newsweek layoffs and the end of the print publication.

Most importantly, does this mean that Mr. Sullivan--who is not a fan of New York--will return to Washington?

He hates Manhattan!

Andrew Sullivan has never been shy about expressing his opinion and when it comes to New York—where he's lived for all of two weeks—he's not pulling any punches.

In a Daily Beast post written today—entitled, what else? "New York Shitty"—Mr. Sullivan tells us just how much he hates this horrible city. He hates it a lot. He hates the crowds, he hates his apartment, he hates the internet here and he even hates his cell phone service. Most of all he hates how much he's paying to hate all these things.

"A glance at your bank account shows a giant sucking sound as the city effectively robs you of all your pennies at every juncture. When you're there for a few days or a week, it can be bracing. But living with this as a daily fact of life? How does anyone manage it?"

We've often asked ourselves that same question, but this is coming from a writer who's presumably well paid as one of the prize ponies in The Daily Beast stable?

But worst of all—and this is really unforgivable—Mr. Sullivan compares New York unfavorably to Washington D.C.

Okay, we get it. He just moved. It's hard to adjust to a new city. Washington D.C. has been his home for many years, so it's not like he's making an objective call here. But still.

What does Mr. Sullivan think is wrong with the city besides everything? Well, first off, as a kind of disclaimer, he admits that it was kind of a thrill to be here at first. He loved visiting and the beginning of his residency— his first week? or few days? or day? or hours?—but "after the initial wonderland feel, you get to adjust to a whole new rhythm."

Well, it's been two weeks now and the bloom is definitely off the rose.

For starters, there's the internet, which is so terrible it's surprising that Mr. Sullivan was able to communicate his feelings to us at all. "It's like going back in time," he writes. "We bought the most expensive cable package to expedite my work at home - and it just decides to crawl like dial-up every few minutes. My wifi cannot get a signal that's stable.  My iPhone is suddenly iffy - calls are dropped and online access is far slower than in DC. And if you keep your wifi open, it gets grabbed by squeegee hotspots that are hard to get rid of."

Time Warner cable is also just awful. I mean, it made Patrick Stewart lose his will to live. In Mr. Sullivan's case, he had to live-blog the debate, or "Obama's implosion" as he likes to call it, from the Beast offices.

The Beast offices are, of course, located outside Mr. Sullivan's apartment, which involves a harrowing journey on the city sidewalks. "Just to walk a few blocks requires barging your way through a melee of noise and rudeness and madness."

And it's not like he can escape the misery at his apartment, which is one-fifth the size of his place in DC and has scalding hot water that comes out of the cold faucet. He doesn't even have a good couch where he can curl up in a ball and weep because the store delivered the wrong one.

Clearly Mr. Sullivan is just in a really bad place right now (we mean emotionally), but he swears he's trying to like it here because he has a year-long lease and no choice but to remain in this hell hole the rest of us call home. As inspiration, he's even embedded a video of Alicia Keys singing "Empire State of Mind."

Come on now, Mr. Sullivan, sing along: These streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you, let's hear it for New York.

kvelsey@observer.com

We were always told James Buchanan held that title but, inside, Andrew Sullivan argues that the President 'gets' gay people because, as a biracial American, "Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet."

Look at us, talking about magazines! Like it's 1995 again.

According to The Post, “When Tina saw the Time cover, she laughed and said, ‘Let the games begin.’

Your move, Bloomberg Businessweek.

Daily Beast TV, the online video channel The Observer first caught wind of in July, has launched on the Beast's website. Though none of the shows bear the name of Ms. Brown’s erstwhile CNBC show, Topic [A], Daily Beast TV makes the same promise: original news commentary from trusted personalities.

The channel’s slogan, “the smartest take on the day’s biggest stories,” is reminiscent of Cheat Sheet’s “read this, not that,” suggesting an audience overwhelmed by the volume of news and starved for a Brown-curated mix.

One existing video series already features the Daily Beast TV logo: “Ask Andrew Anything,” the rotoscoped web-camera videos in which the star blogger Andrew Sullivan answers reader questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” (A: He won’t say, but he does recommend we see Tree of Life.)

Another, "Op-Vid 2012," introduced yesterday, invites "writers, thinkers, and doers" to read essays about the issues at the heart of the campaign, which are then  animated by the Daily Beast. The first features Niall Ferguson on the economy.

"Beast Feed" appears to be more of a catch-all category, including videos related to content in Newsweek, like a video of last week's cover girl Condoleezza Rice playing the piano and casual chats between Daily Beast entertainment writer Ramin Setoodeh and Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, called "Flick Picks."

The new video initiative suggests the company is still prioritizing the digital operations at the Beast, which has enjoyed a slight bump in traffic since swallowing the Newsweek website and now attracts 10.3  million unique visitors a month, according to the company's Omniture report. (Compete.com reports 2.5 million and Quantcast reports 3.9 million.) Internally, however, some wonder if the business side is equipped to sell advertising for such an amorphous media company.

Newsweek's print advertising was down only 10 percent last quarter, compared to 20 percent drops the previous two quarters, but it remains a drag on the business. Much of Newsweek’s veteran print-ad sales team has departed. In August, associate publisher and Beast veteran Jeff Barish left for Condé Nast and was soon followed by five others in ad sales, who departed for positions at Time, Inc., US Weekly, Bloomberg Businessweek and Harper’s Bazaar, according to an insider, who added that the decision to publish a recent double issue had been made due to flagging ad revenue. Yesterday Adweek wrote that the company lost $30 million last year.

Newer executives may be better equipped to sell the custom digital advertising packages touted by Ms. Brown. Publisher Ray Chelstowski, formerly of the short-lived magazine for the super wealthy, Prestige, and president Robert Gregory, poached from Plum TV last month, both come straight from luxury media, suggesting the once-stodgy newsweekly may be courting advertisers befitting Ms. Brown’s Talk days. Today, the Daily Beast TV vertical displays a large Lexus campaign, although individual videos do not have commercials.

But even one year later, Beast brass still appear a little unsure as to what exactly they’re after. One of Mr. Chelstowski’s hires, a vice president of marketing, has already been let go, according to an insider.

The best selling book author goes on to highlight some of the hyperbole lauded on these new services. He quotes Mark Pfeifle, a former national security advicer who said Twitter should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. "Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy," wrote Pfeifle.

Gladwell sees this mostly as lazy, self aggrandizing journalism from bloggers like the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. He quotes Golnaz Esfandiari, who wrote in Foreign Policy this June that, "Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran. Western journalists who couldn't reach-or didn't bother reaching-people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection," she wrote. "Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."

When you're asking people to contribute only a little, writes Gladwell, these online services can be very powerful tools. But this is different than the kind of sacrifice required for real change. "Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists," Gladwell write. "But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is."

Gladwell is right that a lot of the rhetoric around social media activism is inflated and self serving. But he's wrong to imply that a network of weak ties can't accomplish serious change. One could argue, for example, that social media played a crucial role in electing our first black president, a historic moment in our nation's struggle for equality.

"It's demoralizing and dispiriting. But it is my deepest belief that every time this question is thoroughly debated, and each time we put ourselves, our dignity and our families on the line, we win even if we lose.

"This is about changing people's consciousness, deep down, the prerequisite of changing the law. And sometimes simply witnessing a majority strike down a minority so emphatically makes the point more powerfully than anything else."

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

Many other sites praised social media as a savior during the protests. Certainly, the site has become an important news channel for its avid users and an empowering tool for citizens under strict regimes. But some bloggers have cautioned against relying on sites like Twitter to assess all of these seemingly random pieces of Iran election news and fired off counter arguments against the Twitter revolution. Here's a roundup of the wary:

Tom Watson at TechPresident.com: "I think there are limits, especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers' guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall. Sure, Twitter (and Facebook and text messaging and blog and YouTube) can be effective information outlets for revolutionaries, but it's utterly facile to suggest that information technology is driving the currents of unrest in Iran. I can understand the impulse, though; after all, we (the digerati, the plugged in, the Twitterverse) are watching it unfold online. And, you know, wherever we are, well, that's where the action is."

Sunny Bunch at AmericasFuture.org: "What all of these first person missives are missing is context. I’m thrilled that the Iranian people are finally fed up with what they’ve seen from their government (and again, Andrew’s doing the lord’s work by passing all this stuff along). But it’d be really, really unwise to read too much into what’s happening before we have someone on the ground filling in the gaps who doesn’t have a vested interest in the result of this revolution."

Ken Layne on Wonkette: "you know people probably used CB radios to report a first or whatever in 1976, but that does not mean CB radios were ever anything more than a stupid gimmick for idiots."

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital: "Still, the media hyping of tech tools as savior is reliably annoying. Television, of course, changed the Presidential elections, of course, as radio had before that. And, more recently, weren’t mobile phone cameras critical in reporting the bombing in London’s Underground in 2005? Or wasn’t Facebook key to protests in Burma in 2008? And, even more profoundly, didn’t the simple fax machine get lauded during the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square in Beijing as an heroic gadget? Reported Time magazine in 1989: 'When word of the massacre in Tiananmen Square first reached the University of Michigan, the 250 Chinese students studying there jumped into action: they purchased a fax machine. Daily summaries of Western news accounts and photographs were faxed to universities, government offices, hospitals and businesses in major cities in China to provide an alternative to the government’s distorted press reports. The Chinese students traded fax numbers back home along the computer network that links them around the U.S. The fax brigades at Michigan were duplicated on many other campuses.' Ironically, hardly anyone today uses a fax machine at all, having moved onto more effective methods of sending out critical news, data, pictures, updates and more."

Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic: "There's plenty of misinformation out there, like rumors that Ahmadinejad is going to stage an assassination attempt, so we need to be careful about how we judge the information.  If we're a savvy analyst, we need to be careful about the weight we attach to photographs and video accounts. They're the most immediate and emotionally powerful, but they can distort our understanding of the situation, particularly of about the importance of specific developments."

Andrew Sullivan on the Daily Dish: "Ambers posts some wise words about how to judge the torrent of information we and others online are bringing you. This is raw data - riveting raw data, but subject to subsequent review, analysis. Skepticism is merited. But open eyes and ears are as well."

Provocative though it was, that question was not what had brought Bonnie Fuller, John Stossel, Adam Moss, Nick Denton, Sigourney Weaver, Ira Glass, Judith Regan, Wendy Williams, and a smattering of semi-bold names—some clutching notebooks, many clutching drinks—to this event. They were here at the invitation of The Atlantic, where Mr. Smith is president and James Bennet is editor-in-chief, to enjoy some chili and margaritas and listen to Andrew Sullivan and Michael Hirschorn address the question asked on the invite sent out by the magazine's P.R. team: "What is the Future of Media?"

No answer was supplied during the 30 minute discussion which had Messrs. Sullivan and Hirschorn sitting on a small stage overlooking a rapt—occasionally twittering (and Twittering)—crowd. Mr. Bennet, who moderated the discussion, informed everyone that the two men were once housemates in Washington DC: "The pertinent fact is that I've known Andrew so long, I knew him when he was straight," Mr. Hirschorn joked. (Apparently Mr. Sullivan had "an unreasonably hot girlfriend" at the time.)

Mr. Bennet started the discussion by asking Mr. Hirschorn about that day's New York Times Company quarterly earnings report. "It was pretty dismal," Mr. Bennet, a former Timesman, offered.

"We're in kind of in remarkable, uncharted waters," Mr. Hirschorn said. "There are scenarios in which The Times does not go out of business, but becomes a very different entity."

Mr. Hirschorn, no idle observer, had wondered In the January/February issue of the magazine if The Times could cease printing in May.

The magazine editor-turned-producer foresees "profound changes and they're gonna be unpleasant." Later, he told the crowd of media workers, "I think it might be that there will be a time in the wilderness where there will be a huge and wrenching, horrible fallout... I mean, it sounds like Road Warrior or something. I don't mean to sound like people are eating out of dog food cans. It's really not that bad!"

Apocalypse, soon: Well, that's one plausible future of media.

Mr. Sullivan, pulling on a bottle of beer, wasn't so much concerned with dying newspapers as he was with the promise of blogging, something he'd written about before.

The writer described what attracted him to blogging in the first place: "The thrill was, for me—this was when Clinton was President—you could go on at night and be mean about [a] Maureen Dowd column before anyone had read it... So she would never even get the pleasure of the, like, twenty minutes of praise." This was met with a big laugh from the audience.

Later, Mr. Sullivan told The Observer he posts 300 items a week to his blog, The Daily Dish, calling it "an obsessive compulsion."

The blog, which he started as an independent venture in 2000 according to his bio, was hosted for a period on Time magazine's Web site, before it was brought to TheAtlantic.com in January 2007.

"I'd do it for nothing!," Mr. Sullivan said. "I used to be incentivized for traffic, but we changed that. And I realized, damn, I gave it away."

Working for free: A very plausible future for media as well.

The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller has an A1-promoted story headlined Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps, in which she reveals all about the Republican candidates' failed bid for the White House. This comes a day after Newsweek broke new ground on the Governor's campaign trail spending spree and Carl Cameron told FOX News (FOX News!) that the woman New York Times columnist Bill Kristol favorably compared to Andrew Jackson didn't know what countries were in NAFTA or that Africa is a continent. (This clip comes via Andrew Sullivan.)

Ms. Bumiller's Times article has some details about the McCain and Palin teams' relationships with her colleague, Mr. Kristol, but here's an interesting section about Governor Palin's disastrous interview with CBS Evening News' Katie Couric in September:

There's also a bit about how the Governor found herself on the receiving end of a prank phone call by Canadian radio hosts claiming to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy.