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.
