I've been going through an internal debate lately about whether to keep Is Greater Than going--as any publisher (web or print), could have told me, the challenges of running a consistently-updated publication are many, and even moreso if you have any pretensions to offering a quality product. Said product's quality is debatable, though the intensions certainly are for it to be so.

It's hard to consider ending it, for any number of reasons: supportive readership, a great community of contributors, and my personal attachment to the project. I’d like to think that the concept behind it is inherently sound, even if the energy it demands is even more than I initially anticipated.

All the same, it's exhausting, and the personal burnout has taken its toll. The site, which was running as many as six pieces weekly last fall and in the spring, has sputtered into an unsteady rhythm of one piece a week (if even that.) Burnout is certainly a factor, but there are other considerations going through my head:

I can't help but wonder if the entire concept of an online publication--a single online destination curated with a distinct editorial mindset and staff--is becoming antiquated, at least for the small publisher. The blogs and online pubs that were on the ground floor are now the ones with the infrastructure to bear the strain of labor, and the only real breakout successes come from the well-heeled likes of Tina Brown. Which isn't to suggest that I had ever expected or even hoped for IGT to reach Gawker-level traffic, a notion naive enough to be possibly insane, as its subject matter--the overlap of independent culture and leftist politics--is inherently niche. Still, it's difficult to maintain a certain level of engagement over time with only a volunteer infrastructure and the demands of work and personal life.

The other consideration is more evolutionary than economic: as social portals like Facebook and yes, Twitter, demand more and more of the attention of the audience, I have to wonder if the age of independent online publishing was just a historical blip. There will always be a nytimes.com (maybe,) a Gawker, a Huffington Post, a Google News and a handful of other tentpole sites, and a plethora of personal and niche blogs. But is it a completely quixotic notion to develop an online destination for a certain community if said community finds more utility in organizing and discussing on sites like Facebook?  This of course raises the usual set of concerns, about privacy and the ownership of content, though at a certain point that sort of hang-wringing becomes tilting at windmills.

Of course, the other question is whether the very notion of the community IGT was meant to serve was ill-defined to begin with. There are certainly plenty of anarchist news aggregators, for people into that sort of thing; IGT had no intentions of defining itself as such (mostly because I consider anarchism to be more of an academic affectation than a useful political framework, but more on that here.) In addition, the loosely-defined “DIY” community has all but splintered online: the crafters off to Etsy and crafts blogs, the musicians off to music-oriented communities, and the visual folks subsumed into the larger online design culture. With the activist and leftist parts of the community retrenching into the anarchist community online, or the progressive post-boomer din of the liberal blogosphere, I’ve found it a difficult over time to articulate exactly who the audience of the site is. Are we serving an actual audience in search of what IGT offers, or a theoretical audience that exists only in our minds (or nostalgia)?

This all isn’t to suggest that IGT will go dark tomorrow or next week; I’d like to continue with it, albeit in a slightly less ambitious form. Still, these are all issues that I think through on a regular basis, and which are good to get off the chest.