20200
P
1
20100
R  E
2
2070
D   I   C
3
2050
T   I   O   N
4
2040
S   F   O   R   J
5
2030
O  U  R  N  A  L
6
2020
I  S  M  2  0  2  0
7

A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)

“Such spaces are escape hatches from the horse-race election cycle: People are looking for those escape hatches, and they’re looking to create them too.”

I read plenty of newsletters, but I don’t subscribe to very many. Often — especially in the case of the personal and quirky, and the less overtly news-pegged — I scroll through the archives of newsletters on the web and read several editions at a time.

It’s great. It’s like reading blogs.

Newsletters seem to have circled around from being the new blogs to being like blogs (but with posts that are emailed to readers). The web interface of any given public Substack is basically that of a blog. You can even set up comments. And there are subscription apps like Stoop that organize newsletters’ content as RSS readers did for blogs.

One reason we might see a resurgence of blogs is the novelty. Tell someone you’re starting a new newsletter and they might complain about how many newsletters (or podcasts) they already subscribe to. But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow.

It’s been long enough now that people look back on blogging fondly, but the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet. Internet users are savvier about things like context collapse and control (or lack thereof) over who gets to view their shared content. Decentralization and privacy are other factors. At this moment, while so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters have — a venue for material where not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected.

Blogs offer the potential to broadcast, but not too broadly. We might even see a breakdown where newsletters begin to focus more on individual personal stories and daily digests, while blogs will fill in the gaps of all that might be written about otherwise.

It is genuinely pleasant to scroll through Jason Kottke’s blog when I have no idea where else to click on the internet. It’s pleasant to scroll through the archives of various newsletters too. Such spaces are escape hatches from the horse-race election cycle: People are looking for those escape hatches, and they’re looking to create them too. So why not start a blog?

Joanne McNeil is author of the book Lurking: How a Person Became a User, out next month.

I read plenty of newsletters, but I don’t subscribe to very many. Often — especially in the case of the personal and quirky, and the less overtly news-pegged — I scroll through the archives of newsletters on the web and read several editions at a time.

It’s great. It’s like reading blogs.

Newsletters seem to have circled around from being the new blogs to being like blogs (but with posts that are emailed to readers). The web interface of any given public Substack is basically that of a blog. You can even set up comments. And there are subscription apps like Stoop that organize newsletters’ content as RSS readers did for blogs.

One reason we might see a resurgence of blogs is the novelty. Tell someone you’re starting a new newsletter and they might complain about how many newsletters (or podcasts) they already subscribe to. But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow.

It’s been long enough now that people look back on blogging fondly, but the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet. Internet users are savvier about things like context collapse and control (or lack thereof) over who gets to view their shared content. Decentralization and privacy are other factors. At this moment, while so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters have — a venue for material where not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected.

Blogs offer the potential to broadcast, but not too broadly. We might even see a breakdown where newsletters begin to focus more on individual personal stories and daily digests, while blogs will fill in the gaps of all that might be written about otherwise.

It is genuinely pleasant to scroll through Jason Kottke’s blog when I have no idea where else to click on the internet. It’s pleasant to scroll through the archives of various newsletters too. Such spaces are escape hatches from the horse-race election cycle: People are looking for those escape hatches, and they’re looking to create them too. So why not start a blog?

Joanne McNeil is author of the book Lurking: How a Person Became a User, out next month.

Rick Berke   Incoming fire from both left and right

Millie Tran   Wicked

Nicholas Jackson   What’s left of local gets comfortable with reader support

Colleen Shalby   Journalists become media literacy teachers

Sarah Alvarez   I’m ready for post-news

Nushin Rashidian   Are platforms a bridge or a lifeline?

Heidi Tworek   The year of positive pushback

Adam Thomas   The silver bullet

Jeremy Olshan   All journalism should be service journalism

Joshua P. Darr   All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse

Barbara Gray   Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement

J. Siguru Wahutu   Western journalists, learn from your African peers

Cory Haik   We’re already consuming the future of news — now we have to produce it

Zizi Papacharissi   A president leads, the press follows, reality fades

Rachel Davis Mersey   The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide

Cindy Royal   Prepare media students for skills, not job titles

Julia B. Chan   We 👏 take 👏 breaks 👏

Tonya Mosley   The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks

Sarah Marshall   The year to learn about news moments

Victor Pickard   We reclaim a public good

Brenda P. Salinas   Treating MP3 files like text

Imaeyen Ibanga   Let’s take it slow

Jeff Kofman   Speed through technology

Hossein Derakhshan   AI can’t conjure up an Errol Morris

Doris Truong   The year of radical salary transparency

Steve Henn   The dawning audio web

Raney Aronson-Rath   News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions

Jake Shapiro   Podcasting gets listener relationship management

Jakob Moll   A slow-moving tech backlash among young people

Kevin D. Grant   The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth

Laura E. Davis   Know the context your journalism is operating within

A.J. Bauer   A fork in the road for conservative media

Stefanie Murray   Charitable giving goes collaborative

Francesco Zaffarano   TikTok without generational prejudice

Anthony Nadler   Clash of Clans: Election Edition

Richard Tofel   A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges

Sarah Stonbely   More people start caring about news inequality

Jonas Kaiser   Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists

Sarah Schmalbach   Journalist, quantify thyself

Dannagal G. Young   Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart

An Xiao Mina   The Forum we wanted, the forum we got

Beena Raghavendran   The year of the local engagement reporter

Tanya Cordrey   Saying no to more good ideas

Craig Newmark   Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation

Mariana Moura Santos   The future of journalism is collaborative

Don Day   Respect the non-paying audience

Alice Antheaume   Trade “politics” for “power”

Felix Salmon   Spotify launches a news channel

Nikki Usher   All systems down

Candis Callison   Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change

Linda Solomon Wood   Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal

Masuma Ahuja   Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful

Errin Haines   Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story

Carrie Brown-Smith   Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening

Kristen Muller   The year we operationalize community engagement

Monica Drake   A renewed focus on misinformation

Kathleen Searles   Pay more attention to attention

S. Mitra Kalita   The race to 2021

Sue Robinson   Campaign coverage as test bed for engagement experiments

Talia Stroud   The work of reconnecting starts November 4

Ernie Smith   The death of the industry fad

Dan Shanoff   Sports media enters the Bronny era

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The business we want, not the business we had

Lucas Graves   A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters

Ben Werdmuller   Use the tools of journalism to save it

Nico Gendron   Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z

Greg Emerson   News apps fall further behind

Margarita Noriega   The platforms try to figure out what to do with single-subject newsrooms

Cristina Kim   Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”

Mike Caulfield   Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd

Helen Havlak   Platforms shine a light on original reporting

Seth C. Lewis   20 questions for 2020

Heather Bryant   Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving

Mira Lowe   The year of student-powered journalism

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists get left behind in the industry’s decline

Catalina Albeanu   Rebuilding journalism, together

Mary Walter-Brown and Tristan Loper   Power to the people (on your audience team)

M. Scott Havens   First-party data becomes media’s most important currency

Emily Withrow   The year we kill the news article

Bill Adair   A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song

Rachel Schallom   The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates

Kerri Hoffman   Opening closed systems

Meredith Artley   Stronger solidarity among news organizations

Sonali Prasad   Climate change storytelling gets multidimensional

John Keefe   Journalism gets hacked

Knight Foundation   Five generations of journalists, learning from each other

Tom Glaisyer   Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful

Alexandra Borchardt   Get out of the office and talk to people

Geneva Overholser   Death to bothsidesism

Mario García   Think small (screen)

Kourtney Bitterly   Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation

Michael W. Wagner   Increasingly fractured, but little bit deliberative

Elizabeth Dunbar   Frank talk, and then action

Marie Gilot   This is fine

Peter Bale   Lies get further normalized

Irving Washington   Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job

John Garrett   It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization

Fiona Spruill   The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves

Juleyka Lantigua   A changing industry amps up podcasters’ ambitions

Brian Moritz   The end of “stick to sports”

Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker   A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech

Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb   Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage

Tamar Charney   From broadcast to bespoke

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show

Josh Schwartz   Publishers move beyond the metered paywall

Gordon Crovitz   Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms

Madelyn Sanfilippo and Yafit Lev-Aretz   News coverage gets geo-fragmented

Sara K. Baranowski   A big year for little newspapers

Joe Amditis   Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table

Nathalie Malinarich   Betting on loyalty

Carl Bialik   Journalists will try running the whole shop

Jennifer Brandel   A love letter from the year 2073

Whitney Phillips   A time to question core beliefs

Meg Marco   Everything happens somewhere

Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor   Think twice before turning to Twitter

Alana Levinson   Brand-backed media gets another look

Lauren Duca   The rise of the journalistic influencer

Bill Grueskin   Our ethics codes get an overhaul

Simon Galperin   Journalism becomes more democratic

Monique Judge   The year to organize, unionize, and fight

Matthew Pressman   News consumers divide into haves and have-nots

Ståle Grut   OSINT journalism goes mainstream

Jim Brady   We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own

Jasmine McNealy   A call for context

Christa Scharfenberg   It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women

Matt DeRienzo   Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers

Joanne McNeil   A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)

Logan Jaffe   You don’t need fancy tools to listen

Joni Deutsch   Podcasting unsilences the silent

Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young   The promise of nonprofit journalism

Pablo Boczkowski   The day after November 4

Annie Rudd   The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph