A Good Run

It's okay for a publication or a business not to live forever

I’ve been thinking more about something I wrote here following a recent piece about abandoned blogs, and whether or how a publication should “die.” I compared blogs to restaurants in this way:

A restaurant can close down because of a tragedy—a fire, the death of the owner. It can also close because the owners retire after many successful years. And of course, it can fail and go out of business. But “closed” and “gone out of business” don’t actually mean the same thing. In the case of retirement, you could even call it completion rather than closure. That particular project went on as long as it could, and it was closed down, but it didn’t really die or fail. Just about every business eventually ends, but what exactly that end is can differ.

In other words, a publication or a restaurant can end in the sense of dying, or end in the sense of something like a book finished being written. It can simply have a good run. A book ends, but you wouldn’t say it has a lifespan.