Photo by nwhitford on Flickr. 

I started Is Greater Than in late 2007 with little direction or ambition, as a response to the sadness and frustration I felt after the end of Punk Planet magazine, where I served as an intern and a reviews editor during its last year. Despite my brief tenure at the magazine, I had been a long-time reader, and it had a huge impact on my thinking. I credit Punk Planet with inspiring me to leave the soul-sucking customer service jobs I had held for 13 years, and pursue a writing and editing career. My only real hope with Is Greater Than was that I could in some small way try to carry on the legacy of politically-minded cultural coverage that Punk Planet excelled in. 

As a result of that excessively vague mission, Is Greater Than has seen multiple permutations in the past four years, from a overtly political direction in the early days to its recent incarnation, in which politics still inform the coverage but the focus is more squarely on culture, literature, art, life and music. 

When starting a blog or online magazine, every seasoned blogger or journalist or media pundit will tell you that the key to building traffic is specialization, focusing on a topic with a laser focus and excelling in your coverage of that. I read this sentiment many times while starting Is Greater Than, but specialization seemed incredibly boring to me. I’m a generalist, as are most of the people I know and whose work I respect. Of course it’s essential to develop a unique perspective, and really know your shit — something I learned the hard way with a series of very earnest, but misinformed takes on topics such as Constitutional Law during the 2008 election — but I wanted to edit a site that included contributors with a wide array of interests.

That probably hurt Is Greater Than’s traffic in the long term — aside from a couple spikes when posts received the attention of major blogs, we settled into a pretty consistent average of a couple hundred visitors a day — but it made editing the site much more interesting and rewarding.

I still think general-interest coverage can work online, but it requires a strong, well-articulated, unified point of view. (Or lots of startup money.) My primary regret with Is Greater Than is that we didn’t identify a distinct POV early on. The importance of that is something I’ve learned over these four years, as well as many other things — how to set an editorial direction, work with writers of varying backgrounds and levels of experience, write CSS and PHP, manage databases, and the importance of knowing what you’re talking about before hitting the publish button.

Unfortunately, it’s now time to bring Is Greater Than to an end. There are multiple reasons for this: other personal and professional projects dominating my time and attention, my need to focus on a number of other developing projects, and a WordPress installation buckling under four years of relative neglect. It’s sad to end it, but it’s time to move on.

I can’t fully express my gratitude to the many people who have read, supported, edited, interned for, and contributed to Is Greater Than. A full list of our contributors can be found on the about page, but there are a few people I’d like to specifically mention, for their support and/or work for the site: former editors Brigid Barry, Gabriel Levinson, and Laura Pearson; long-running contributors Matthew Beck, Laura M. Browning, Leland Cheuk, Leilani Clark, Lynette D’Amico, Levi Fuller, Matt Gajewski, Cat Johnson, Peter Koht, Janina Larenas, Tom LG, Lavinia Ludlow, Erica Phillips, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Kai Smart, Kira Wisniewski, R. John Xerxes, and Michael Zapata; and Daria Davis, Anne Elizabeth Moore, and Dan Sinker, without whose work and support, I might still be serving coffee drinks for minimum wage. If you’ve enjoyed the site over the past few years, be sure to follow those links and keep abreast of their excellent work.

As for me, my primary gig, where I use many of the skills I’ve learned here, is editing the science, technology and civicsystem channels of Shareable.net, an online magazine about the sharing economy. If you’ve enjoyed reading Is Greater Than, I urge you to check out Shareable. We cover a broad scope of topics I think are relevant to IGT readers — collaborative consumption, culture and community, social media, open source software, activist efforts around the world, and much more.

In addition, I’m an working freelance writer covering the politics and culture of technology, underground movements, music, books, art and comedy for a variety of publications. Links to my work and more can be found on my site at paulmdavis.com. I’m also focusing more on my music, exploring podcasting, and dusting off the old domain 12ptplan.com to use as a place for longer-form blogging and musings. It’s pretty bare right now, but won’t be for long. Follow the RSS for 12 Pt. Plan here. You can also keep abreast of my activities, as well as any random smart-ass thoughts that come to mind, on Twitter at paulmdavis.

I’m incredibly proud of the work we have done over the past four years, and though the site will cease publishing, the archives are not going anywhere. Most of all, thanks to you, the readers, whose interest, support and feedback have made it an incredibly rewarding experience.