Housekeeping

Well, this is a big one.

I've accepted a position as political blogger for Bloomberg View. I'm consolidating all my stuff over there. Yup, after four plus years, I'll be your Plain Blogger no more.

Or at least, not over here. The plan is basically to do what I've been doing since I started: same topics, same regular items, same everything. I won't, at least at first, be doing columns there (or elsewhere). Just the blogging, all back under the same roof, as it was when I started here. It all kicks off a little after New Year's. I'm very excited about it; it's exactly what I've wanted, having all my stuff together again (and, yes, to get paid for it, too). I'm very impressed with the folks over at Bloomberg View; all I can tell you is that every time I asked any of them about whether they wanted more of this or less of that, they basically had the same answer: we like what you've done, so keep doing it. So that's what you can expect when I get over there.

What do I want to do now? I want to thank a whole lot of people. John Sides and Seth Masket, for linking to me and making me surface-respectable right away. Andrew Sullivan was very generous with his support from very early on. Ezra Klein has been terribly important in boosting the meeting of political scientists and journalists, both publicly with links and other support and behind the scenes. Both Andrew and Ezra trusted me with guest-blogging gigs well before I was anyone's obvious choice for that sort of thing. Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Jonathan Cohn have been very generous, again from early on, with both links and with occasional advice when I asked. And certainly Greg Sargent has done more for me than I can ever hope to repay.

More: the people at The New Republic, Salon, and the Prospect who picked up my stuff. Paul Glastris, too, at Washington Monthly, and Fred Hiatt at the Post. Also the editors who I've worked with and taught me how to write columns...quite a few good ones, but especially Seyward Darby, Gabriel Arana, and Jaime Fuller.

I'm missing a lot, and I apologize to those I'm leaving out. If anyone is still reading: what I need to impress on people is that really without exception bloggers have been extremely open and generous towards me the whole time I've been doing this.They may bring the snark, but what's important is that they act as colleagues, not competitors.

And thanks so much to all of you for reading Plain Blog, and especially to the commenters who made this a really nice place to hang out. I hope you all follow me over to Bloomberg.

As far as this place...

I'm off on vacation beginning Sunday and going through New Year's. After that, I'll have a couple of days, and then start the new gig. I'm really not sure what, if any, posting I'll be doing in the interim. Not much, for sure, but I may do the occasional item...haven't even decided whether to put What Mattered and Sunday Questions up this weekend (we're driving to Phoenix on Sunday, so I'm not exactly going to be plugged in very much).

After that, I really don't know about the old blog. I'll certainly be leaving the site up for the old posts...as of now, I'm not aware of anything that I do here that they don't think fits over there. But we'll see. All I really know is that most of my stuff will be over at Bloomberg View. I'll see you there!