"So far it has been pro bono, but eventually I would like to have a salary," Sullivan said, adding that the journalistic freedom of the site is its most attractive feature.
"You get to write things and you don't have to put all the substantiation you'd put in a print article in a little online posting," he said.
Sullivan said that freedom also comes with peril -- the ability to make mistakes, easily and often.
"It is a little scary because you have no filters," he said. "If you make a mistake you must correct yourself at once or else you will alienate your readers."
Kaus said that the me-zine sites can easily become profitable because there are usually no, or few, employees. He said that other Web sites were far overstaffed and that led to their demise.
"Pseudo.com, dead," Kaus said. "Feed, on ice. Inside, sold. Salon, dying. Kausfiles, profitable."
David Talbot, the editor in chief of Salon, said Kaus was wrong about Salon. "We're not dead yet, so he is getting ahead of himself," Talbot said.
David Patrick Columbia, the editor in chief of Quest magazine, introduced a Web site last fall called nysocialdiary.com, a daily column about New York social life that employs only Columbia and one assistant. Columbia has made about US$3,000 in advertising revenue, he said, and has received enough requests to run ads that he hired two advertising salespeople who start at the end of the month.
Columbia said that he was an avid Internet reader but that he is generally suspicious of political me-zines. "The only problem I see with andrewsullivan.com or any of the other serious me-zines is that it is all generally a lot of pontification without real reporting to back up the opinions," Columbia said.
Talbot of Salon added that he thinks of me-zines as "one-man vanity presses."
But Sullivan said that his readers understand his role as an opinionated filter. "They know that my job is to read everything I can and get irritated as much as I can and splutter for them on a daily basis," he said, adding that he provides links to everything he writes about.
Drudge provides links, but he does not see himself as the proprietor of a me-zine. "I don't write my opinions," he said. "I consider myself more of a network, more like Rupert Murdoch, than some solitary guy. Does Katharine Graham run a me-zine?"
"Oh, the ego," Columbia said. "The ego has landed."
Of course, there is an element of the egotist to most me-zine operators. Kaus said that although his three-figure profit does not mean he'll be test-flying Gulfstream jets, it is an opportunity for some seriously gratifying schadenfreude.
"That's US$318.60 The New Yorker didn't make this year," he said.
Kaus said that he was not sure yet how he will spend his windfall.
"I was thinking of buying a used chair," he said, adding that he understood that Kurt Andersen, a founder of Inside.com, had a really nice Aeron chair for sale.
"I figure it's symbolic," Kaus said. "The Aeron chair was the symbol of the dot-com boom, and now that it's bust I hear you can get the chairs at fire-sale prices."
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