Really what Molly Lambert and Charlie Warzel are complaining about today is that no one will pay them to blog.
Guess what?
Much of the work done to “make the internet good” and a place for “writing […] that’s joyful or an attempt to be creative” happened as avocation, not vocation. Basically no one was getting paid for it. To quote Brett Simmons: “If you want to see more blogging, just do some blogging.”
If you want to lament a lack of paid blogging gigs, then do that. Don’t declare blogging dead, disparaging all the people still blogging or returning to it, just because you can’t make a career of it.
Addenda
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An irony here is that the road to today’s internet where people are lamenting the demise of paid blogging went through an era where the rise of paid blogging was lamented as part of the beginning of the end.
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“A lot of people are doing the work,” expands Brent Simmons. “You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.”