The blog-shaped object as an endangered species.

"There’s an increasingly common view... that old-fashioned conversational blogging is being killed by social media, because the big traffic is driven now by Facebook and Twitter, which can only trade in quick hits. Long conversations don’t go viral. Bloggers linking to each other can only ever be small scale,"  writes William Finnegan, in The New Yorker.

The Dish was a singularity, in that it was a freestanding business, basically selling just a distinctive, unedited voice—Sullivan’s. It’s not that there are no excellent political bloggers left. There are. But they tend to be attached to large publications, like Paul Krugman, at the Times (or John Cassidy, at this magazine). Bloggers with a particular expertise are thriving—in economics, notably. It’s the unaffiliated generalist who’s endangered. Sullivan says he loved shooting from the hip, reacting to the news as fast and as candidly as he could. Since he is given to intellectual drama, he often overreacted, and much of the entertainment of the Dish was watching him walk back his more outrageous arguments....

It’s the unaffiliated generalist who’s endangered. I take it that Finnegan means for us to read "endangered" in the sense of "endangered species," as if there was at time when Unaffiliated Generalist Bloggers reigned, and now these creatures are dying out. I don't feel endangered, because I am in control of how long this enterprise continues. But those of use who  like to read individualistic, endless writing from authentic bloggers may feel we are in danger of getting cut off by our suppliers. But I don't think there ever were all that many real blogs of the Andrew Sullivan kind. The supply was always short, and we readers of blogs always faced scarcity.

It may seem as though blogs were plentiful pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter, but Twitter and Facebook are essentially blogs. These are simply minor tweaks in the format. There's a big difference in where the money flows. Facebook and Twitter have successfully captured the money, not that blogs were ever very good at channeling money to the blogger. Facebook and Twitter may satisfy some writers by giving them the impression that they are in a big place, with an audience.

On a traditional blog, you can see (or ignore) whether you have traffic. When you know you have readers, it's an incentive to keep the old-school blog going, to keep the café open. But even with good traffic, you'll probably find — as I think Andrew Sullivan did — that the money isn't good enough to make sense of all this work.

And yet, I've always thought — from the first day 11 years ago — that it is the intrinsic value of the writing that sustains blogging. Without that, you don't have a blog. You have a blog-shaped object.