Buggy Whip Makers Herald The Death Of The Automobile

Oh, no, wait... wrong title there.

It's the NYT, Buzzfeed, and Andrew Sullivan who are announcing the Death of the Blog.

On November 2011, Politico's most prominent blogger, Ben Smith, declared the advent of the "the post-blog blog." "The dusty old form of the personal political blog has required some updating. Twitter has replaced any individual blog as the place the political conversation plays out," he wrote. "Other successful bloggers—from Andrew Sullivan to Michelle Malkin, Chris Cillizza to Ezra Klein—have been edging in different ways toward institutionalizing what works, staffing up and formalizing their beats to better serve their audiences." Smith was announcing that his own blog, which dated back to Politico's beginnings nearly five years before, would undergo a similar sort of change. About a month later, though, he announced that he would become editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, a website where nearly every article is, in a sense, a blog post, but there are no actual blogs, and whose traffic model depends in no small part on discovery via social media. In other words, a post-blog blog.

A couple of quick comments.

First, as it's been years since I've followed the news through anything but blogs and social media, I find this terribly amusing.  Citing the closing of Google Reader as a death knell for the blog is kind of like citing the closing of your local gas station as the death knell for the automobile.

Second, blogs and social media provide a very independent voice for much of the discourse in America and the world.  Compared to the MSM and new media houses, conservative and libertarian voices in the blogosphere aren't just loud, they're raucous and - even worse! - unruly.  They have a disturbing tendency to routinely dissect and dismantle the carefully crafted view of events that authoritarian  media wants to disseminate.

So it's easy to understand why the NYT, Buzzfeed, and much of the authoritarian media would love to see blogs fade away.  Because an army of Davids makes their lives a living nightmare.  Heck, the couldn't even handle one Breitbart.

Will there be changes?

Sure. We've seen major changes in news, social media, and blogs happen in just the last decade, and frankly, I'd be shocked if they didn't continue to come at a pretty good clip.

Will the "age of the blog" fade away?

Possibly.  If it does fade away, though, it will only be because it is replaced by something that is better at accomplishing the exact same thing.

That "exact same thing" being, of course, driving thorns into the side of NYT editors.