Some Thoughts on Blogs

There were a couple of comments the other day about some of the way that Balloon-Juice is being handled, and that, plus Oliver Willis’ interview, got me thinking about blogs in general. Here’s my take, for what it’s worth.

Political blogs became a “thing” around the time of the Iraq War, so let’s say the early 2000s. Though there were a fair number of right-leaning blogs, I always felt that blogging was a thing that Democrats adopted. There was a vacuum in the left-wing media ecosystem, since the party has never been able to sponsor or run its own media, so blogs filled the void.

At that time, you could actually make money if you had a blog that ran ads. This, combined with freely available blogging platforms (like Blogger), made it possible to eke out a living as a blogger, or at least have a hobby project that made you a little cash. In addition to the bigger blogs (“big” being relative — I consider LGM and Atrios “big”), there were a ton of smaller projects that wouldn’t make any money (like the blog I started to report on New York’s 29th Congressional District.). I remember this as an exciting time, a time when journalism was in decline but still active, and when bloggers and journalists interacted.

That ended in the early 2010s, coinciding with he rise of social networking. Journalists in particular went to Twitter and interacted there. Though social networks and the end of decent ad revenue were the main cause of the decline of blogs, you could name hundreds of other factors. One is that political blog audiences, at least the ones I read, skew a lot older than the general public. This is true of political blog authors as well. It’s not a youth phenomenon: in general the kids don’t blog. So, people dying is a reason that blog readership is down.

For Balloon-Juice in particular, I think Twitter was a big reason for the decline. I didn’t get active on Twitter (and I’m kind of losing my interest in BlueSky), but the meat and potatoes mistermix, DougJ or John Cole post on B-J was a few pithy sentences about some piece of journalism or some quote by a politician. That’s basically a tweet, as DougJ’s NYT Pitchbot account shows. Regular B-J contributors like Betty Cracker and John also wrote longer-form posts. Those were rare from DougJ and me. More occasional bloggers like Tom Levenson wrote mainly longer form stuff. It was a nice mix, but my wheelhouse at the time (short posts) really seemed irrelevant once Twitter got going. (Atrios, for example, still runs a blog with short, pithy posts, and it’s successful, but I lost interest in continuing that.)

The other thing that happened to B-J was the Biden Presidency, and the genuine legislative achievements there. I think the 2020 election and the success of the most progressive legislative agenda in decades made a lot of people think that we’d turned a corner, that Trump was just an aberration. The B-J Biden fan club was operating at full tilt, and I think part of the reason for that was to convince everyone that happy days are here again, that Trump is going to be a bad memory. To be clear, I thought the early part of Biden’s Presidency was great, but the 2022 election should have been a big wake-up call, and last Summer’s candidate replacement fight was a divisive disaster. In such turmoil, it’s no surprise that there were fights in the comments.

Anyway, that’s my take on blogs and B-J in particular. As the X-ray clearly shows, blogs were broken long ago.