What Blogging Has Become

This is a post about Medium, which is a fascinating company partly because it has a lot of money, and partly because its leadership team first brought you Blogger (the first really successful blogging tool) and Twitter (Twitter), and which released a whole slate of new features this week in a kind of confusing way.

But first it is about this question: What is web writing in 2015?

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You know, web writing — that chatty, affable, ephemeral old thing. The thing that prized personality over pomp, the thing with feathers (and links). What does it look like?

Does its writer work for a big website like BuzzFeed, crafting listicles, quizzes, reporting, and personal essays? Do they write a newsletter? Or have they fully abandoned HTML, and now they’re trying their luck with a podcast?

It’s worth asking the question, because of course — of course — they don’t blog. Blogging — I mean, honey, don’t even say the word. No one actually blogs anymore, except maybe undergrads on their first week of study abroad. 2015 has been, so far, dismal for the art. On the establishment side, there’s burned-out Andrew Sullivan polishing off the Daily Dish a little more than two years after he took it independent. Meanwhile, the old “alt-blog” kingmaker, Carles, sold his Hipster Runoff to an unnamed Australian investor for $21,100 this week.

Open up an old blog and it was a list of posts in “reverse-chronological order” (meaning newest-at-top), written by a single author or a set of them, with a collection of topics connecting the whole enterprise