My friend the journalist Porter Anderson has died suddenly. I learned of his death via an email newslist I belong to, Read2.0. The list is composed of hundreds of people who work in publishing and libraries, mostly with a digital focus to their expertise. Porter was a member of Read2.0, though he rarely contributed. I think he would have been amazing by the outpouring of shock and grief that came through when the list founder posted the news, and by the dozens of comments below the announcement in Publishing Perspectives where he was Editor-in-Chief.

I met Porter around fifteen years ago when we were both frequenting the then active and engaging digital + publishing conference circuit that flourished across the English-speaking world. We attended Books In Browsers, a small gathering that took place in the Internet Archive back when people still thought digital would transform reading and writing in ways that are starkly different from how things actually turned out. So many of the appreciations of Porter that have been written since Wednesday’s news broke start with a line like this: Porter was there, seated at a table at the back, his screens set up so he could commence live tweeting the proceedings. Live tweeting! This was at a time when Twitter was a wonderful thing, a hive mind platform where you could directly connect with the most interesting people the internet had to offer. And Porter was one of those people.

Porter Anderson the Third, or rather Porter Anderson III – that was his name! And Cooper Anderson, his lovely beagle, surely the best name a dog ever had! I haven’t known many Americans from the South; Porter was the son of a Baptist preacher and that ‘the Third’ always made him laugh. He had courtly manners and tons of charm and had led a varied life, which included working for CNN for a decade. He’d trained as an actor and was a great and knowledgeable supporter of the arts – but now I’m sounding obituaryish, and that’s not what I want to say here. Porter was a loner, an extroverted introvert, who when he wasn’t flying around the world to publishing conferences on his beloved Delta Air (he is the only person I’ve ever known who really did love his chosen commercial airline), lived in Tampa where he fretted about the dire state of the Democratic Party and worked long hours delivering excellent copy on the publishing industry. He was a good friend. He liked a nice glass of wine. I wish he’d finished the novel he was writing and that it was next on my reading pile.

And now he’s gone. Wednesday morning I received an invite to speak at a publishing conference in Italy next April; my very first thought when I read the email was, oh good, Porter will be there. Then just a few hours later the news came through. Porter is gone. I will miss him enormously.

Here’s a piece that Porter wrote for us on The Writing Platform back in 2013: Aerial Performance: Other People’s Audiences. And here’s a piece on Porter by our mutual friend, Laura Dawson.

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