David Frum writes today:
“The greatest reward of writing for NRO – aside of course from the lavish pay and princely benefits – is the contact from readers. I’ve written for a lot of magazines and papers in a lot of the world. Never have I written for anyplace where the readers write with the thoughtfulness and conviction that you see in the email from NRO readers.”
I remember when David first came on board NRO and he was just stunned by how smart NRO’s readers are. Ditto goes for me. My problem is worse than David’s though, because he had a lengthy writing career before he came on board NRO. I, on the other hand, had written very little under my own name (a couple pieces for the Wall Street Journal and a few reviews for magazines like Commentary, the Public Interest, the Standard and NR). So, as I grew up on NRO I became hopelessly addicted and in some ways I felt entitled to huge feedback — positive and negative — from readers. For a long time I thought it was simply a product of the web versus print. But I don’t think that explains all of it any more. Even now, I get more responses to a random post in the Corner than I do to op-eds in major newspapers which certainly appear on the web. NRO is very lucky to have cultivated the readers we have and when we have enough of you we shall unleash you upon the lands as an unstoppable army of …. oh, wait, sorry. I was revealing a bit too much.