By Dan Duray, cover story for the New York Observer, February 7, 2011 issue

...In his November farewell post, after a five-year stint on the Atlantic blog, Marc Ambinder wrote that it will be a relief to head to the National Journal, where he will feel no compulsion to turn every piece into the opinion of "a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."

"You're competitive in terms of getting something first, and then you're competitive on getting a take that is close to the truth so much as it can be approximated, and then you're competitive in building and keeping an influential and broad-based readership," Mr. Ambinder told The Observer, speaking with exhaustion of his time on the Web.

With the Jason Kottkes and Andrew Sullivans already established and still working, he added, it's become increasingly difficult to carve out a niche.

"We're at a stage now where that market is saturated, so it's the long tail phenomenon. We're getting to the point where it's really, really hard once you start, unless you're a phenomenon or something," he said.

This saturation of opinion dripped into the personal blogging sphere as well, with Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter becoming the preferred mode for oversharing....