Eight Blog Years

Consistency in branding is an undersold byproduct of writing a blog.

As I recently observed about this summer’s eighth anniversary (read my anniversary blog post here), I initiated the blog in an uncertain year, 2008, after readers asked for new material and a movie studio executive encouraged me to write in the format. I added a blog to my professional writing website as an experiment with low expectations.

I could not have anticipated that the online writing format named as an amalgamation of the terms Web and log would become an influential communication form which would both transform and bypass major media. Bloggers would join major newspapers. Blogs would appear for top broadcasting programs. Blogging platforms such as Tumblr, Huffington Post and Medium would compete in content creation.

More important to me is the fact that the blog would become a pivot point in serious discourse.

Back in 2008, I had embarked on several new writing projects. Encouraged by a friend who was a Duke University history professor and book author, I had applied for and was accepted in a four-year writing and philosophy program. I was busy writing in multimedia formats. A blog was low in the hierarchy.

But so much happened. Focused on three main areas — philosophy, culture and movies — I found the rush of events to be a fertile proving ground for what I describe as my informal approach. Whether writing about the newest big budget action movie, cultural trends or the nearly 25-year-old suicide of a journalist, the blog (which I considered naming before letting it be) became my steady source for posting short commentary and long form writing.

When a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist read an interview I’d conducted with him on the blog and commented that he’d never seen such a quality piece published in that format before, I realized that writing without running my copy through the gauntlet of stifling, politically correct rules — enforced by a phalanx of modern media editors—was liberating.

Certainly, I had gained from having some of the best editors throughout my career and they often improved my writing. Certainly, my blog writing has since made me too indulgent and long-winded, as an editor recently observed. But, in these eight blog years, I’ve refined my thinking. I have clarified my philosophy. I have learned hard and valuable lessons in what used to be called desktop publishing.

The upshot of writing on a blog, let alone one hitched to social media — and this includes blogging platforms such as Medium — is that the blog is a mostly controllable means of communication which grants an indelible expression of one’s thoughts.

Blogging matures as freedom of speech and the press comes under siege.

Today’s media is self-censored. So, as blogging becomes more difficult and exercising free speech becomes more critical — under threat of censorship, war, mass and targeted murder of journalists, surveillance statism and economic collapse — the blog affords the individual an editorial enterprise of his own making. The writer can act to gain and keep his values through this unique means, cite and link to sources, write controversial thoughts, demonstrate mastery of his knowledge and propose a radical new idea.

As the Western press constricts — driven by a self-fulfilling prophecy of government control, cronyism and sensationalism made possible by the divide between the public and the new intellectual — the self-made blogger expands the sphere of influence and not necessarily in growth detected and measured by metrics. The blogger draws upon what he knows, voices both his passion and his reason, argues for justice, makes and corrects mistakes and lets readers know about what’s asinine, what’s missing and what’s crucial about existence — or he loses (or never gains) the reader.

He who writes the blog is accountable to those who read. This is his pact with the reader and this is his payment.

I know that making, refining and using one’s voice through writing is its own reward. Acquiring, earning and keeping an audience allows the blog to become a branded hallmark of one’s thoughts, observable, searchable and accessible over time. This is why the blog has emerged as an example of the unconquerable power of the pen. In a mixed, confused age of looming, converging threats, including the constant danger of the rule of a tyrant’s sword, the individual’s blog may be the most powerful weapon for self-defense.