Back to Blogging?
I’m pretty good with the predictions, terrible with the timing.
Back in 2015 I thought that the trend would be back to blogging. I simply expected it would happen in 2016. But no, the trend waited until 2018, after the Facebook scandals. I first wrote a post titled, “A Blog as a Home Address,” sometime in 2015, and then re-worked it in 2016 when I thought the change was imminent:
Just when it seemed that we were starting to settle into the new media era, everything went sideways. Why? Two main reasons:
- The volume of information. There is so much clicky crap out there. We need vetting, either by people who sift news and commentary for a specific topic or by those who sift general news for quality.
- Right media has been rocked by this election cycle. As my colleague at PJMedia noted, established news habits have shifted in recent weeks, and there will be no going back. [So far, there hasn’t been. The landscape changed. Sites and sources changed. For example, I did not remain at any of my old publications, and I’m not an oddity.]
Add on minor problems with social media. [Apparently, they were too minor then. The shift I saw coming did not arrive until the social media problems were major.] Twitter’s use of shadow blacklists and uneven enforcement of bad behavior has dampened the platform’s appeal. Facebook changes its algorithms often. As soon as you get settled into a news reading pattern, they change the rules. Medium is trying to recover from becoming a “Try my new app” platform, which did not work as users hoped.
Then, in news and commentary, online magazines pop up and fade or get absorbed into bigger endevors at varying speeds.
Right now, how does anyone make that informed-citizen threshold of the past. Once upon a time, citizens could skim the WSJ or NYT headlines while listening to the local news over coffee and the nightly news after dinner and be able to discuss issues competently at the water cooler or PTA meeting and vote with basic knowledge in elections at local, state, and national levels. Now, with the floods of information coming at us from everywhere, is it any wonder if the American public seems oddly under-informed. It is easier to ignore the flood and float on the surface rather than drown in it.
It all hurts local awareness particularly hard. How do local stories manage to break through the national and international trendy news?
I see a re-sort coming. And as mentioned previously, I still have a hunch that personal websites will end up like mobile phone numbers, at least for those who put their name to public commentary. Writers almost need to be their own self-contained unit. This would also help us avoid what Prof. Jacobson noticed: conservatives essentially got trapped by Twitter.
A few bloggers have gone back to their old sites, and many of their once active commenters have returned to those comment threads rather than commenting on Twitter. I’ve experimented with other networks, everything from Disqus to GoogleGroups to Medium. None match the efficiency of a single website. I will go back soon as well.
Now, the scandal driven social media exodus and the flight to quality have been met with the need for personal connection. I’m with Brad Barrish, the time for a return to blogging is now.
I already did the other things mentioned. I started a weekly curation service and a Medium publication that became more training ground than the magazine I envisioned. I joined another Medium publication, Arc Digital, that aims to be the best opinion site on the internet. Their “go big or go home” attitude appeals to me. I also redid my bookmarks as my own newspaper, which is how I read before social media exploded. Now I’ve updated and renewed that system. I’ll do some how-tos on that soon — with many thanks to Shoshana Weissmann for introducing me to Trello.
Now it is time to build a website, again. That’s my summer project.
Part of that project is a return to writing real life stories again. I like it. I missed it. I’ve recently had a bunch of requests for it — which surprised me but probably shouldn’t have. Everyone loves storytelling. One friend came up and said she used to read my stories with a cup of tea at night to get though toddlerdom. Made my day — and I have teenager stories now and parent bloggers often give up writing teenager stories.
I have a theory about that, actually. Little ones can’t protest the telling of their stories so it is easier to imagine that we parent writers “own” the stories. Later on teens and tweens can protest and, since writing is also personal, the conflict between parent and kid of whose story something is to tell encourages an all or nothing decision. Nothing typically wins. But family storytelling doesn’t have to be a fight. It can be a discussion, a collaboration. I don’t claim to have that all sorted, but I did anticipate the problem, after following the example of someone older and with more experience, of course. There are ways to make it all work.
As it happens, I have many stories that I never ran because 2017 was a pretty dreadful year for the Lofti. I ended up with a major case of everything block. I wrote Writing Through Grief about a month before my father-in-law passed away, while my husband was in the hospital with sepsis. My husband is fine now, but if you read that story, well, that made for quite a year.
I finally feel like myself again, and by finally I mean in the last few weeks. So all that pent up writing is trying to come out, although I have no idea what kind of schedule it will keep. I’m still a mom, after all, and in the tradition of “when I’m an old woman, I shall wear purple,” I’m a mother of teens and longtime writer and thus I shall drop a pretense of schedule.
And finally, the Irish Wolfhound pup on my lap in the banner photo is now a year old and no longer fits in my lap. I have a few stories to tell about her. She’s a riot — sometimes in a more literal sense.
