Click here to visit Robert D. Sullivan's blog.
There aren’t many intelligent, interesting, funny television critics in the city of Boston. Luckily, I was able to find one. Robert David Sullivan, who has created a blog under the same name, is more than just your average snarky television blogger. He writes about an array of subjects, ranging from economics, to politics, to popular culture and urban life. While he hasn’t quite found one narrow focus, he has instead written on a variety of subjects that truly interest him, and the proof is in the pudding.
Robert Sullivan grew up choosing politics over sports, and excelling at history and English. At the time, he didn’t know that he was different from other kids his age. “It’s hard when you’re a kid because you don’t know. You think other kids are like you. So I never thought of it as, ‘oh I like to write more than other kids.’ I didn’t realize that other kids didn’t like to write,” he says. His interest in politics and geography stayed with him through adolescence, and through college. He eventually graduated from Boston University with a degree in Political Science.
After college, Sullivan worked in the financial aid office at his alma mater, before following his political dreams to Washington in 1987. There he worked as a legislative aid for U.S. Rep. John Conyers. Soon thereafter he returned to Massachusetts and began his career as a journalist. He began at the bottom, as most journalists do, as a reporter for the Fitchburg-Leominster Sentinel Enterprise.
After working his way up, Sullivan was hired at The Boston Phoenix in 1993. He began as supplements editor, where he, according to his C.V., “assigned and edited stories for the sports, education, and holiday sections and was the first editor of the ‘One in Ten,’ the print version of the popular radio program for the LGBT community.” Later on he became a contributing writer and editor, where he wrote, much like he still does, on a variety of topics including politics, art, and television. He says that writing was the fun part and editing was “the day to day grind.”
He attributes his positive experience at The Phoenix to a young staff and an exciting newspaper atmosphere, where he could jump around from job to job. But after ten years, he decided to move on. His next job was at CommonWealth Magazine. He called his experience there rewarding but different.
“By then journalism had changed, so it wasn’t quite like a newsroom. It was more dealing with people who were just emailing things in and I never really saw them face to face. Things were outsourced. Things were done offsite. It wasn’t as day to day exciting as being at The Phoenix,” Sullivan says.
His two favorite topics to write about are politics and television. Within those categories, he has a more narrow focus than in the blog as a whole. In politics, he enjoys writing about political geography. He describes it as writing about the way a state, city or town behaves in elections and how they have changed over the years. He likes writing about that specifically because “political pundits understate the degree to which geography matters in politics. They’re more about soccer moms and office dads. Well, a soccer mom in Texas is not a soccer mom in New Hampshire.” He says there is a large emphasis on demographics, whether its ethnicity or gender or religion, but not as much about geography, and that people “miss a lot of interesting stories” when they assume different groups are the same regardless of where they live.
Michael Jonas, executive editor at CommonWealth Magazine, says the writing Sullivan did for the magazine “occupied a unique niche.” He says, “Robert has an incredible appetite for electoral statistics and a great eye for making sense of numbers and telling great stories from them.” According to Jones, Sullivan’s political stories have ”been a mainstay over the years of CommonWealth’s coverage of election and politics, and fit perfectly within our mission to explain politics without engaging in either hyperventilating opinion pieces or completely shallow ‘horse race’ that just follow who’s up and who’s down without any meaningful context or analysis.”
His other favorite topic, television, also happens to be mine. He began becoming really interested in writing about television in the 90’s. He wrote a long piece for The Phoenix about taking television seriously, and treating it with the same respect as film or theater. He says, “at the time that was kind of new. I think people kind of take that for granted now but at the time it was sort of, ‘its just TV.’”
When it comes to what he spends his time watching in front of the boob tube, it isn’t reality TV. This is because, according to Sullivan, there is so much television, and in order to “follow it seriously and write about it you have to have some parameters.” He is more interested in scripted storytelling that tries to “do things only television can do, which basically means exploring a character over a long period of time.” When it comes to what networks are doing the best job, he names HBO, Showtime and FX. He says their storytelling is good and they push the envelope. Their downside, he says, is that “like all networks they have their niche audiences and they tailor their product to that, so there can be a little bit of redundancy and sameness.” They also run the risk of “running the well dry with a certain type of show and character, like the flawed anti-hero.” He writes about this in his piece “Boardwalk Empire: TV and the art of the anti-hero.”
Along with television, Sullivan also likes to write about film, although he doesn’t do it a whole lot. When he was at The Phoenix, he reviewed any art that he could, so he did some then and would like to do more writing about significant films and genres. “Television can have some overlap with films because some people go back and forth and they use similar themes,” he says.
Speaking of the recurring recent themes like boxing for example, films like “The Fighter” have renewed interest in using Boston as a backdrop for Hollywood blockbusters. He doesn’t know how long this will last. He says that if film making becomes less “Hollywood-ized, then Boston could become a major source of low-budget films that find an audience on the Web or elsewhere.”
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The main reason for profiling Sullivan, was because of his blog. He began blogging around 2006, while working at CommonWealth Magazine, and did it on an irregular basis. Then he created a blog for Commonwealth called C.W. Unbound. Last year, he left Commonwealth, freeing himself to work on his own personal blog, with the intent of blogging on a more regular basis, ideally daily. For him it is still difficult to come up with a focus, which he says sometimes you need in order to be a successful blogger. He has trouble with this however, because he has so many diverse interests and gets such diverse feedback from people who read it. “Some people say I love the TV stuff and other people say, I don’t watch TV, just write about politics,” he says.
Sullivan knows the value of blogging, and has even passed on the idea to his friends. Roland Tec, founder of Pinkplot Productions, says that he started his blog, Extra Criticum, because of Sullivan. They met as members of a Boston improv comedy group called Naked Brunch and according to Tec, always “saw eye to eye as far as appreciating things that were unusual.” As an editor for The Phoenix, Sullivan gave Tec writing assignments and the two remained friends even after Tec relocated to Manhattan. Tec recalls, “Robert told me I had to have a blog and I thought if Robert says to blog, I should blog. But I wanted it to be a group blog, where a lot of people could have their voices heard.”
And there you have it, Extra Criticum was born. According to Tec it took a while to get used to blogging. “When you’re used to writing things and editing them over and over before showing them to anyone, it’s hard to get used to writing something and just posting it,” he says. Over time, he got the hang of it, and now enjoys the group aspect of the blog best. “What I like most is the back and forth, the immediacy of people being able to comment and respond. In that way it’s a kind of community, and with E.C, it’s a community of artists talking about the arts.” Naturally, Sullivan’s work is featured on E.C. and Tec describes him as “the best TV guy.” While he loves his television writing, Tec also appreciates Sullivan’s political analysis, specifically mentioning a piece he did during the 2008 election for Commonwealth Magazine.
Jones attributes CommonWealth’s foray into the blogging world to Sullivan, saying, “he has a real gift for this form of journalism, offering pointed and usually pithy observation on a topic, often by linking to some other media treatment of the issue.” He also thinks blogging is a great addition to journalism, and “when done well, it provides a platform for more informal, breezy coverage and commentary that can stimulate discussion and promote a healthy dialogue between journalists and readers.”
The point of a blog is to hook readers, and keep them coming back for more. Sullivan has been working on this by utilizing social media. He is using Twitter and Facebook. He was surprised with the traffic that Facebook was able to generate for him. “At first,” he says, “I saw it as something for my friends, so I thought, I’ll try to get as many Twitter followers as I can, and try to have as many other blogs link to me as I can. But I realized, if you really want to get yourself out there, you really have to use Facebook, so I’ve been friending people I don’t know. I’m friending people I see on Twitter or I see have blogs of their own, and a lot of them, most say yes. So Facebook has turned into much more of a marketing tool then just something for my friends.”
While he hones his blog, Sullivan continues to do freelance writing and editing, although mostly just editing because “most of the writing places have dried up or they just don’t pay enough to make it worthwhile.” He says that the world of journalism is ever changing, and up and coming journalists have to evolve with it. He says that while he never had to do video or social media before, journalists today have to have a much wider range of skills.
