Blogs And The State of Media in 2022
My morning read usually includes a stop at Boak and Bailey’s blog.
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Are blogs dead?
Something must be in the air, because that question has been floating around lately. In recent weeks longtime bloggers like Stan Hieronymus and Boak and Bailey have gotten existential and wondered aloud how healthy our medium is. It’s timely for me, because this is the moment on the annual calendar when I reach my personal blogoversary, which has now reached 19 years (😬).
Media in general has gone through a massive transition in the past decade with the rise of social media, the death of magazines, the arrival of podcasting, and, lately, a sort-of return to blogging in the form of email newsletters. Because of this, grandpa’s old blog may seem peripheral to the media world—though by my reading this couldn’t be more wrong. So let’s take a moment and assess where we are.
Blogs are dead, Long live blogs
Blogs share something in common with beer. The word “blog” is a lot like “craft” or “micro.” Like early craft brewers, bloggers were micro-media with a chip on their shoulder. Instead of big, commodity beer, they opposed big media. Born in the early years of the new century, they were all small and independent, but over time became more professional and often corporate-owned. Just like craft breweries. The quirky first-person perspectives featuring off-topic obsessions (Friday catblogging is a surreal example) gave way to blander, third-person reporting. Blogs thrived on linking to other sites and existed as much as collectives as sole-proprietorships. Of course, sending people off your site is terrible business, and as ads and the subscriber model were born to support blogs, they became far more insular and standalone.
That transformation was accelerated by a massive shift in the way we receive media. In some ways, it is the most under-reported technological change in modern society. For hundreds of years, the control of media and its delivery had profound effects on society, even though the new technologies and forms (the printing press, the novel, radio, and TV) were less radical than what is happening right now.
Social media
The internet was a big disruption in that it blew apart the traditional gate-keeping function of newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. Blogs were just the first democratized delivery system to break through—social media was the mass-movement that created a revolution. Instead of subscribing to a newspaper, now we click links and flit around the mediasphere. Instead of going through four sections of the morning paper, we now see an article in the New York Times, another in the Washington Post, and maybe one in a local newspaper in Kansas we never heard of. We see videos on YouTube and TikTok, we check in with our favorite influencers on Instagram, we see what new beer our favorite brewery has released, and we check ESPN to see how many threes Steph Curry got last night.
This has had too many effects to document here, though the most profound is that we no longer share news sources, and as a consequence live in different mental and emotional countries. That’s surely true of hard news, but also niche news like entertainment, sports—and beer. If you like IPAs, you follow a certain group who talk IPAs; if you like light beer, foreign beer, or lagers, you follow other people. I have seen this first-hand in my social media streams and in terms of who visits this site.
Podcasting
This one is sneaky huge. For radio cord-cutters, podcasts are an audio Netflix. We don’t have to listen to ads anymore and we aren’t subject to the tyranny of a broadcast schedule. They’re really cheap and easy to produce, so everyone has a podcast now. Get in a car, go for a run, throw on a podcast! Until pods came around, one of the most inflexible bottlenecks in media was the radio dial: it was finite and highly regulated. Podcasts have democratized audio content almost as powerfully as social media has been another siphon drawing people away from print media.
(We could add video here, too, and how YouTube and now TikTok have acted as a counter to broadcast and cable.)
Substack/Newsletters
The newest “innovation” isn’t one, really. Just a year old, more or less, the Substack phenomenon has created a new way for independent writers, artists, and journalists to reach out to readers directly via Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 technologies (email newsletters and blogs). The newsletters go out, and the blog posts they contain are threaded online. It’s difficult to predict whether this model can survive, but the fact that such a development would become the media story of 2021 illustrates how the death of blogs may have been at least somewhat exaggerated.
Blogs Will Save Us
Blogs are like craft breweries in another way. Although we focus so much of our attention on big breweries and seltzer-makers, the small-scale model has proven itself incredibly durable, growing right through market crashes and pandemics. They are vital parts of the local community, incubators for new innovations, and protectors of tradition. Blogs are much the same. If you’re willing to accept that your audience isn’t going to be huge, there’s a lot you can do with one. Blogs have fractions of the readership of well-trafficked Instagram accounts, yet all you have to do is think of Ron Pattinson or Lars Garshol to remind yourself where we’d be without them.
A quick ramble around the current blogosphere illustrates how valuable these one-person operations are, and how much they enrich our understanding of beer.
Fifteen years ago, we traded myths and legends about how beer was made in the old days. Then historians Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson (still on blogspot!) came along and started providing real info. They inspired a new generation of serious historical work that has made us far more knowledgeable.
Em Sauter illustrates (sorry) the range of the blog by posting her winning comics on Pints and Panels.
Norwegian blogger Lars Garshol single-handedly introduced English speakers to the world of Baltic and Scandinavian farmhouse brewing and made kviek an important commercial ingredient.
Following his book, Hops, Stan Hieronymus has become the bard of lupulin, providing tons more information than we laypeople have ever before received.
Local blogs have supplanted the “brewspapers” of the 1990s and picked up where newspapers have fallen down. Great examples include the Washington Beer Blog, The New School (Oregon), San Diego Beer News, Brew York, and DC Beer.
I love how two Irish expats Eoghan Walsh and Breandán Kearney, have become such eloquent voices for Belgian beer, and Eoghan’s “50 Objects” series has become one of the signature accomplishments in beer blogging.
I could go on and on—I hesitate to mention the UK because there are so many good bloggers there—but I can’t end without mentioning Irish blogger John Duffy, who has without a doubt amassed the greatest collection of beer reviews on his long-running site “The Beer Nut” (also still on blogspot!).
(I haven’t had the influence of some of these bloggers, but I’m still proud of some of the cool stuff I’ve done here, including campaigning against cheater pints, fighting egregious beer tax hikes, and trying to elevate underrepresented breweries.)
It’s true that the total number of blogs has declined over the past decade, but the number of good blogs has never been higher. Moreover, they fill a role that would otherwise be left vacant. Beer is little-covered by newspapers and magazines, and often merely superficially. No one is going to print one of Ron Pattinson’s lists of 19th century grists in the Wall Street Journal. Social media is great for opinion and linking, but not much else. Imagine Lars trying to present one of his enthnographies on Twitter. Larger, more ambitious projects like Craft Beer & Brewing and Good Beer Hunting are doing fantastic work and I don’t want to diminish their effort. But blogs are still critical in the media ecosystem—and, given the anemic state of print journalism and the increasingly toxic nature of social media, more important than ever.