The Admiral, Decommissioned

Well, this is disappointing command decision - at least to me:

Today brings exciting news and an end to a time in my life that has proven far more successful than I ever dreamed. Beginning on March 1, I will begin working for Michelle Malkin, a friend, mentor, and writer I have long admired. She has offered me a position as writer at Hot Air, and my blogging will appear exclusively there.

That means that I will close out Captain’s Quarters sometime in March.

Nothing against Hot Air or Double-M, both of which I peruse on a regular basis and of which my fandom is avid and perpetual.  I'm sure that Ed Morrissey will make a fine addition to the Hot Air staff, and one can hardly blame him for jumping at a chance to add a full-time paying writing gig to his Blog Talk Radio job.  That is what is generally known as hitting it even bigger, and given how very few people get to combine hobby and livelihood, well, let's just say Ed has truly earned his blessings.

Still, I share Strata's and Sister Toldjah's well-meaning dismay at the Admiral's decision to shut down CQ.  I have to conclude that doing so was a condition of the Hot Air deal, but I don't understand why Michelle Malkin would impose such an exclusivity stipulation.  After all, she still has her blog, and I don't see why Ed couldn't write material for Hot Air as well as CQ.

One of the primary appeals about blogging for me has always been the self-expression aspect; the shingle you hang out in the blogosphere is uniquely your own, and the look as well as the content can be tailored to your specifications and even the occasional whim.  It's not unlike running your own business for years and then abandoning (or selling, perhaps?) it and going back to work for somebody else.  After all that time calling your own shots (and being wildly successful at it), becoming an employee again doesn't seem like a natural decision, and would be difficult for me to undertake - no matter how worth my while Double-M made it.

I don't have any worries that Ed will be forced to toe an editorial line and submerge his particular views that don't line up with Malkin's and Allahpundit's.  He'll doubtless continue to offer the same candid, mostly center-right commentary that he has for the past five years at CQ - why else would Hot Air have tried to land him?  But given that, why give up CQ?  Why not do both?

I guess that speaks to Ed's not having let his success go to his head.  A pity that that success will now belong to somebody else.

UPDATE: Not that this is any big deal, or any of my business for that matter, and I'd never ask Ed about any of this, but a day later this move of his to close down CQ concurrent with his move to Hot Air is even more puzzling.

I thought about it thusly: If Michelle Malkin were to come to me with an offer to write for Hot Air as an unpaid volunteer, much less as a paid staff writer, under the same "You must close down your own blog" conditions, I'd be an idiot not to jump at the chance.  Why?  Exposure.  I'd go from pixeling in obscurity to my maunderings appearing before one of the highest trafficked center-right sites in the blogosphere.  It'd be a chance to make a name for myself in something I thoroughly enjoy doing, perhaps even make an honest-to-God second career out of it, and maybe even ultimately parlay it into a reopening of Hard Starboard with a, well, CQ-sized audience.  It would make perfect sense.  It'd be a no-brainer.

But in Ed's case, he's already got exposure, or he wouldn't presumeably have gotten the offer from Hot Air.  CQ is a top-ten site, with substantially greater traffic even than Hot Air does.  The Admiral is already a blogospheric star via CQ and Heading Right Radio.  Closing down his site and moving to HA is a step down for him, it seems to me.  He goes from being The Man on his own top-ten site to joining a stable of writers at a top-hundred one.  I just don't get it.

Ed's case isn't like Dean Barnett's, for example.  DB was plugging away in the dark at his humble Blogger site when Hugh Hewitt discovered him and offered him a co-blogging gig at his blog, which DB turned into a stepping stone to a professional writing gig at the Weekly Standard.  I think it's safe to say that dropping SoxBlog like it was on fire was as easy a choice for Dean as putting HS on hiatus would be for me in similar circumstances.  But again, the Admiral made his own success, and now appears to be deep-sixing it in favor of....something.  Hence my speculation about the deal's monetary aspects.

My "getting it" isn't required, of course, and I certainly do wish Ed all the best at Hot Air.  'Tis a pity that there isn't a way to auction off segments of his reflected notoriety.  With what he must have commanded in exchange for putting CQ into dry dock, those commodities would have come at a substantial discount.