Congrats to Mitch Berg

Mitch Berg's blog, Shot in the Dark, celebrates its 9th anniversary today. While Mitch is one of many excellent conservative bloggers in Minnesota, his tireless efforts and amazing output at SITD continue to be impressive.

Mitch explains how he got into the game:

I was working at a dying little dotcom nine years ago. I was reading a Time article on the “new breed of young conservative intellectuals”.

They profiled Andrew Sullivan and his “blog”. I checked it out. I saw the link to Blogger.com.

And when I got home, after dinner, I set the thing up, and it was off to the races.

And it's been quite a race. In the time since Mitch got started in 2002, a lot of wonderful blogs have come and gone, in many cases because blogging is a time-consuming thing and life often intervenes. Even more have launched, then petered out, because blogging well is exceptionally difficult. The audience is out there but while you can gain its attention in any number of ways, keeping the audience requires more than talent; it also requires the stamina to maintain a consistent level of performance. I was late to the party and I missed the first five years of Mitch's work, but he's been a key influence and unwitting mentor to this feature for the last four years. I suspect that most of the starboard side bloggers in the state would categorize Mitch in the same way.

Some people would argue that blogging is a mug's game and it's true to a certain extent; while we might achieve a modicum of influence, a lot of blogs aren't much more than the equivalent of the wise guy on the barstool who is not shy about sharing his opinion, whether solicited or not. A few bloggers have made it big; the most notable example locally is Ed Morrissey, Mitch's radio partner and the key player at HotAir.com. Ed deserves everything he's achieved, but he's the rare case. Most of us who blog, Mitch included, are still working schlubs who face the blank screen each day more as a labor of love than as a means to professional advancement. The next nickel I make on this enterprise will be the first one I make.

And that's fine, really. Those of us who focus attention on politics are the modern-day equivalent of pamphleteers. Mitch has done much better at the blogging game than most people, yet most Minnesotans wouldn't recognize his name. Still, many of the Minnesotans in positions of power know who he is and take his words seriously, because they know that while he would never claim to speak for anyone other than himself, what he says reflects what many Minnesotans believe. And by sharing what he believes, consistently and with zest and good humor, Mitch Berg has elevated the level of political discourse in this state. That's an accomplishment worth celebrating.