Adam Tinworth reacts (on his blog; I refuse to say blogletter) to Ian Silvera declaring (in his newsletter) that the new rise of newsletters is “not the new blogosphere” and focuses in on a couple of important differences.
This is the one critical idea that was central to early blogging that has not (yet) been widely embraced by newsletters: the sense that bloggers were a community and that the discussion was going on between them. Why did this matter? Well, for one it helped define the voice of blogging - more conversational, more discursive that traditional journalism. That seems less striking now, two decades on, because mainstream journalism has largely appropriated that tone of voice for good or (I’d argue) ill.
But the other thing it brought was discovery - the ability to find other blogs worth reading. This was an era before Twitter, Facebook or many of the tools of discovery we use now. Search — and Google in particular — did exist. And it was one way of finding new readers. But a link from another well-read blogger was the real win you hoped for.
I might agree that some mainstream journalism has adopted the conversational tone of blogging, but only in form not so much function. Mainstream reporters don’t spend a lot of time talking to each other in their reporting. Blogging helped remind people that journalism isn’t, in fact, written by some objective, dispassionate observer floating high above the events of the corporeal world, but by people with their own bodies of blood and bone like the rest of us.
Journalism still doesn’t typically include reporters talking to or interrogating each other, however, so there are limits to which “the voice of blogging” has been carried over.
I do wonder to what degree both community and discovery—and I mean this not only for the new newsletters but for both what remains of the old blogosphere and what there is of a new quasi-blogosphere—simply is undercut by social media’s absorption of (and degradation of) that aspect of blogging.
I’d also continue here my own disdain for the degree to which blogging was consumed by “content marketing”, which results in so much of it being preoccupied by brand building. It’s not at all, as Om Malik would have it, that “what matters is constant engagement with your community/audience”.
What matters is that you blog, whether the “audience” is there or not, because you can’t help but do that.