Farewell (for now) to Dodger Thoughts

Is blogging still relevant in 2012? Is it really worth putting much energy into a site when important life and job matters keep you from doing the kind of blog you really want to do? It's questions I often ask myself as I barely keep Franklin Avenue going -- I used to pride myself on posting at least three times a day; now it's one, if I'm lucky.

But because Franklin Avenue is a small site to begin with, I can keep this place quietly chugging. My friend Jon Weisman had to make a really tough decision recently with his famed site Dodger Thoughts, long one of the premiere blogs for all things Dodgers -- and at one time, housed at the L.A. Times and ESPN. With kids getting older and a more taxing schedule at Variety (include a time-intensive awards blog), and having gone back to his independent blog roots, Jon recently decided to put Dodger Thoughts on hiatus:

Anyone reading this site knows how hard it has been for me to maintain a pretense that the site is still useful in 2012. There have been some decent moments, but mostly, it’s been painful. And it’s not getting any easier. My family and my day job demand bigger and bigger shares of my energy and my sanity. So let’s cut to the chase: I’m designating myself for assignment.

That doesn’t mean I’m never going to post here again – in fact, I can almost promise that I will at some point – but it does mean I’m releasing myself from the daily task of writing about the Dodgers, as well as creating chat threads for every game. Dodger Thoughts has become a burden – the opposite of what it was intended to be – and there are too many other sites that now do what I set out to do more productively. The fact that I’m cutting and running with only two weeks left in the regular season (and a Dodger playoff appearance still very much a possibility) indicates just how much of a burden it has been. For all their problems, I believe in the Dodgers much more right now than I believe in my capacity to write about them. That about says it all.

Go check out Variety's The Vote blog, where Jon is now blogging up a storm.