Jason Kottke on blogging, 2018 edition

Two things on the inter­net that I con­sis­tent­ly like are Neiman­Lab and Kot​tke​.org. The for­mer is Harvard’s jour­nal­ism foun­da­tion and its asso­ci­at­ed blog. They con­sis­tent­ly pub­lish thought-provoking lessons from media pio­neers. If there’s an inter­est­ing online pub­lish­ing mod­el being tried, Neiman Labs will pro­file it. Kot­tke is one of the orig­i­nal old school blogs. Jason high­lights things that are inter­est­ing to him and by and large, most of the posts hap­pen to be inter­est­ing to me. He’s also one of the few break­out blog­ging stars who has kept going.

So today Neiman Labs post­ed an inter­view with Jason Kot­tke. Of course I like it.

There are a few things that Jason has done that I find remark­able. One is that he’s thread­ed an almost impos­si­ble path that has held back the cen­trifu­gal forces of the mod­ern inter­net. He nev­er went big and he nev­er went small. By big, I mean he nev­er tried to ramp his site up to become a media empire. No ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist mon­ey, no click­bait head­lines, no piv­ot to video or oth­er trendy media chimera. He also didn’t go small: his blog has nev­er been a con­fes­sion­al. While that traf­fic when to Face­book, his kind of curat­ed links and thoughts is some­thing that still works best as a blog.

Although I don’t blog myself too much any­more, I do think a lot about media mod­els for Friends Jour­nal. Its reliance on non-professional opin­ion writ­ing pre­fig­ured blogs. It’s a ful­ly dig­i­tal mag­a­zine now, even as it con­tin­ues as a print mag­a­zine. The mem­ber­ship mod­el Kot­tke talks about (and Neiman Labs fre­quent­ly pro­files) is a like­ly one for us going into the long term.

Last blog stand­ing, “last guy danc­ing”: How Jason Kot­tke is think­ing about kot​tke​.org at 20