Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun. Before I came to The New Yorker, my only professional writing experience was at blogs, places where a piece like this one, about disappearing blogs, would’ve been either eighty-five words or three thousand, and the lede would have been abrupt and vividly unprofessional, like a friend grabbing you by the collar at a bar. The image above the text would be some low-cost visual joke—a screenshot, or a cheesy stock photo—and the editing would’ve been as intimate and odd as a tarot-card reading, or nearly nonexistent, or maybe both. Blogs were a one-man-band situation: if you were a blog editor, as I was, you were also a blogger, and many other things besides, so you would spend your days not just writing and editing pieces but formatting and tagging them, finding art, scheduling and publishing, posting everything on social media yourself.
Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience, and they tend to publish like-minded writers, who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay. The result is editorial latitude to be obscure and silly and particular, but the finances are increasingly hard to sustain; media consumption is controlled these days by centralized tech platforms—Facebook, Twitter—whose algorithms favor what is viral, newsy, reactionary, easily decontextualized, and of general appeal. In 2015, Grantland, an ESPN venture with bloggy intimacy, was shuttered. In 2016, the indie women’s blog the Toast folded for lack of a financial future, as did Gawker, which had scaled up, had become ambitious, and then got sued into the ground. At the end of 2017, the local news site Gothamist and seven of its city-centered affiliates were shut down shortly after the staff unionized, and on Tuesday, the beloved, uncategorizable blog the Awl announced that it, along with its sister site, the Hairpin, would cease operations at the end of the month.
The Awl was founded, in 2009, by Choire Sicha and Alex Balk, who, along with the publisher David Cho, had been laid off by Radar Online the year before. Balk and Sicha were also Gawker alumni, and they picked “Be Less Stupid” as the Awl’s tagline; the deadpan tone of that phrase also showed up in their favored headline style: “Book Good,” “Man Gets Job.” In 2010, the Awl brought on Edith Zimmerman as the founder of the Hairpin, a women’s Web site that quickly established a niche in the eccentric and absurd. “You know how having cocktails at a friend’s house can sometimes be more fun than the Big Party you go to afterward?” Zimmerman wrote on the site’s About page, explaining her editorial point of view. Both sites became known as intentionally modest showcases, like Joseph Cornell boxes for writers—places where outsiders and the unpracticed could find something that is becoming more and more elusive: a smart, sympathetic, loyal audience, and an opportunity to sound exactly like themselves.
The sites avoided much of the news cycle, covering subjects like classic Hollywood, the Baby-Sitters Club, “Negroni Season,” giving birth to rabbits, the McRib, and the moon. (That rabbit piece was written by Carrie Frye, who for years, as the managing editor, was the real backbone of the Awl.) The Awl ran a poetry series that included Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” and a heroic crown of sonnets called “The Wrestler’s Book of Saints.” Seven years ago, Heather Havrilesky—whose “Ask Polly”advice column, now at New York, began at the Awl—wrote a joke post imagining Donald Trump in the Oval Office. In 2014, John Herrman, now at the Times, started writing a tech-criticism series that predicted the future with chilling accuracy: a November column assessed journalism as “handicapped” by objectivity and facts within the scheme of Facebook’s algorithm, and envisioned “dog-whistling from the News Feed” dominating “the Facebook election” of 2016. Since 2012, the Awl has been running a series of daily New York City weather reviews by Tom Scocca—an oblique catalogue-memoir written in slush and sunlight.
In 2012, I was a year out of the Peace Corps, in an M.F.A. program in Ann Arbor, and I read the Hairpin and the Awl every day. With essentially no experience writing anything for public consumption, I pitched the Hairpin a series of interviews with adult virgins. When Jane Marie, Zimmerman’s co-editor, wrote back, I was over the moon. For a year, I wrote for free. (The size of the Awl network’s budget had obvious downsides. One enormous upside is that the editors had little excuse or inclination to refuse a random beginner his or her shot.) In 2013, Emma Carmichael took over from Zimmerman and, without ever having met me, offered me an editing position out of the blue. It was my first job in media, and it felt like an obsessive, ad-hoc hobby: one of us would post every forty-five minutes, and each day we’d run two or three short features. The site looked terrible, but it was sort of nice, like being in a friend’s unchanged high-school bedroom. Sometimes I’d be scrolling through the back end of the site, trying to register a new writer, and newly famous names—Amy Schumer!—would jump out at me.
Sicha is now the editor of the Times’s Style section, and dozens of Awl contributors ended up with jobs at more stable media outlets, or with book deals: Jay Caspian Kang, Dave Bry, Mary H. K. Choi, Dan Kois, Reggie Ugwu, Michelle Dean, Nicole Cliffe, Anne Helen Petersen, Rachel Monroe, Vinson Cunningham, Jazmine Hughes, Mallory Ortberg, to name just a few. Many, many others were able to write something they had always wanted to write and wouldn’t have been able to publish anywhere else. Balk and Sicha often advised people to take their best pitches to real magazines first, to see if they could get paid better; they would also, unlike most editors on the Internet, caution writers against selling themselves out.
In 2010, David Carr observed, in a piece about the Awl for the Times, that the idea of a “little digital boutique flies in the face of all manner of conventional wisdom, chief of which is that scale is all that matters in an era of commoditized advertising sales.” Nonetheless, the Awl’s focus on voice and sensibility seemed, at the time, to be working, even financially. That year’s revenue would surpass two hundred thousand dollars, Carr reported, and the site would never have to turn giant profits for investors, because it had none. The owners “just have to eat,” he wrote.
In February, 2015, Herrman, who, along with Matt Buchanan, inherited the editorship from Sicha and Balk, lamented the migration of the Internet onto tech platforms and apps. (Herrman and Buchanan were succeeded, in 2016, by Silvia Killingsworth.) “If in five years I’m just watching NFL-endorsed ESPN clips through a syndication deal with a messaging app . . . and ‘publications’ are just content agencies that solve temporary optimization issues for much larger platforms, what will have been the point of the last twenty years of creating things for the web?” That same month, Balk wrote a post called “My Advice to Young People,” which included Balk’s Law (“Everything you hate about the Internet is actually everything you hate about people”), Balk’s Second Law (“The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about everything”), and Balk’s Third Law (“If you think the Internet is terrible now, just wait a while”). “The moment you were just in was as good as it got,” he wrote. “The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016.”
And now, in 2018, the economics of online publishing are running everyone off the map. I sometimes think, with some regretful wonder and gratitude, about an Awl chat-room conversation that took place in 2013. Some annoying mini-scandal had transpired on the Internet, and everyone else who worked for the little network—they all had years of experience on me—was typing out lively scenarios of what they would do if our online infrastructure magically burned down. Sitting in my little blue house in Ann Arbor, I kept quiet for a while, and then typed something like, “Aww guys, no, the Internet is great.” I meant it, though the sentiment now feels as distant as preschool. Reading the Awl and the Hairpin, and then working with the people that ran them, had actually convinced me that the Internet was silly, fun, generative, and honest. They all knew otherwise, but they staved off the inevitable for a good long while.
This post was updated to include Carrie Frye’s role at the Awl.