Remember when we were all going to get back to blogging? Was that 2018? 2014? 2011? Lots of drafts sitting in un-updated WP installs I bet. It’s not really even a matter of finding a good RSS reader to try and follow – it’s more about figuring out who remembered to pay for the registration fees. Lock didn’t. Maybe that was intentional? Can’t say I understand the strat when the first seven hits are ‘drunk groper’ and the eighth is your round two Vows entry. Hope the new gig with Ben is crushing!
There was also the minor distraction of Substack. Are they still publishing? Good for them! I guess they somehow got extra racist? Like, how is that possible? When your opening gambit is ‘We are going to give a pile of money to Andrew Sullivan’ you really need to put the work in to get more racist than that. But it didn’t stop basically every editor from the extended GM universe from posting up for those sweet sweet sub revenues. And it looks like none of them got anything close to the deal that Freddie de Boer did. Man that dude is just living his best life – he has like a girlfriend and gym membership and all the parties he never got invited to don’t matter because he can text Bari Weiss on the reg? Crushing. Ed Rants probably really kicking himself for passing up on that check.
But it looks like everyone finally got the memo and is going to some even more obscure service whose name is even more nonsensical – even thought they all still own their fucking URLs and can GO BACK TO BLOGGING. Well, Lock can’t. I would hope some enterprising pron stud has secured that shit for himself and we can all finally retire the saddest meme of the Blogebrity era.
Did you know Balk even gave it a spin? I still have enough juice (we will table the convo of what it means in 2023 to even talk about whether or not being aware of the sad spectacle of Alex Balk’s Substack constitutes having any measurable amount of juice for another post) to have seen it. He probably wouldn’t even mind that said juice as a matter of ‘oh god look at this’ which was they way it was framed for me if it yielded that contract. Rent gotta be paid, etc.
Relatedly, I remembered to google if [X] ever published their book and it looks like they did! I couldn’t even email my best backchannel, which is basically dead, because the last good internet 1.0 joke we had is gone. Hope it sold/sells well.
Anyhoo, I’m about to post this and bothered to check to see if the site is still up and it looks like the last post I did was pretty much the same? BUT IT WAS PRE-COVID. Whatevs. I would feel bad except it’s still a more robust publishing sked than like a third of the people you sent $45 bucks to for their insight that turned up like every six weeks.
If you are looking for some real fucking insight into the death of journalism, the real moment we all threw in the towel was just after Lock got hired as editor for Gawker and he mandated 12 posts a day. It was a good plan for GM as a business, but it basically killed the indie blog scene. The man has good publishing instincts, even if his people skills are lacking. Check out this space again in about two years for more arresting insights about things that matter to about three hundred people in Manhattan in 2006.