On the Care and Feeding of Your Favorite Blogger
Editor’s Note: The following post was originally written on Twitter by @SuperWendy. I edited it and republished it here because I agree with the sentiment.
Over the past few years many blogs, both independent and run by Big Business, have shut down. This leaves many readers sad and wondering what they can do. Well, here’s an idea – how about the care and feeding of your favorite bloggers?
Here’s the thing – support comes in all shapes and sizes and doesn’t necessarily mean $$$$. Acknowledgment, a "well done you" every now and then – these are small things but deeply appreciated.
When was the last time you:
- Commented on a post?
- Signal-boosted a link on Twitter or Facebook?
- Bought something using the blog’s affiliate links?
You can’t be sad about bloggers disappearing and then do nothing about it; it would be like mourning the death of local retailers while shopping at Amazon.
O O O
I have always wanted to say this but have never found a tactful way to do so. In fact, I feel so strongly about this that I have tried to turn the post into a graphic for other bloggers to post on their site. (My efforts have not been successful.)
Alas, there aren’t that many bloggers left. Most of the really interesting people I follow are writing on either FB or Twitter. That is fine except if you don’t catch what they are writing when they are writing it then you will probably never see it. And since both Twitter and FB now decide what you get to see, chances are you won’t see someone’s clever writing in the first place.
That shortcoming is a good reason to support writers who still keep up their own blog, wouldn’t you agree?
P.S. The above text was edited and shared with permission of the original author. Neither of would mind if you reshared the text so long as you give credit.
Comments
Maria (BearMountainBooks) December 27, 2018 um 5:12 pm
We’re a dying breed. Happy New Year, Nate.
Nate Hoffelder December 27, 2018 um 5:21 pm
yes, we are!
Robert Nagle December 28, 2018 um 10:58 am
I’ve written before about how social media has kind of stolen the thunder out of blogging (although Google has gradually lowered the SEO advantages of having a blog). I think critic Virginia Heffernan wrote aa few years ago that blogging no longer seemed cool anymore.
Social media became the preferred outlet for microblogging, and although political blogging and IT blogging has stayed pretty consistently popular, I’ve noticed that academic blogging is on the rise and that litblogging has continued to decline. (I was really heartbroken to learn Open Letters Daily folded up, and I had only recently discovered it!
Reddit/StackExchange has also been a significant force in the decline of blogging – although the random tyranny of moderators on subreddits can get infuriating.
It doesn’t have to be said, but Facebook and other social media have taken the low hanging fruit of ad dollars. With all their micro-targeting and access to visitor data, bloggers can never really compete. At some point bloggers need to have a financial incentive to keep going to justify the time spent and ad dollars seems to have flown in an infinite number of directions.
I think this is an interesting time for media again. FB-fatigue is at an all-time high, everybody seems to be interested in podcasting. As it happens, I recently relaunched my own blog to focus on litblogging and specifically to focus on ebook deals — perhaps to make some money through book ads and promoting my own titles. The surprising thing is that I checked back with many of the literary bloggers I knew from about 10 years ago. Many are in mothballs or have jumped onto larger publications (which I guess is a good thing).
I think the urge to blog surges during times of unemployment or underemployment or during times of financial irresponsibility. I checked a blogroll of popular litbloggers and realized that almost all of them were in the 20s — which made me feel ancient by comparison (i’m 53).
I hate to say it, but FB reposting/retweeting just doesn’t help the bloggers all that much — if only because FB or Twitter isn’t that efficient in helping you to filter or organize your reading material. It’s time to visit sites again — as opposed to following social media in the hope that the hive mind might make you aware of a new post. One thing I had fun doing on my blog recently was restocking my blogroll — do you remember how big a deal blogrolls used to be in the early days of blogging? Eventually that sidebar got replaced by multi-column layouts, graphics, futile Google ads and RSS feeds from other places. It was nice to create a new blogroll that was actually useful to me (and perhaps to my readers) — though perhaps I am just acting like a fuddy-duddy.
Finally, isn’t it interesting that it’s 2018 — and still basically a WordPress world?
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