Are Blogs Back?

I came across this story from The Verge (via Dave Pell's always excellent Next Draft). The subhead for the article is: Blogging is back, baby.

Semafor reporters are going to curate the news with AI

Semafor wants to curate more news to make its hompage more valuable — by having its reporters use a custom AI search tool.

The VergeNilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.

Which begs the question: Is it though?

The article is, in substance, about Semafor's newest product—a collection of links, rounded up with the help of A.I., in the form of an old-fashioned blog.

More interesting than the story itself was the Verge's link back to another of its own posts where it expressly says its strategy going forward is, well, blogging.

Now, granted, this backlink is a few years old at this point. I'm an infrequent reader of the website; not averse to it but it's just never been one of my go-to sites. As a result, I'm not really sure how much they've stuck to that strategy, but since they're highlighting it again so recently, I have to imagine they've done pretty well at it.

But I'm thinking about it in conversation with the pice from Discourse Blog I shared recently that said, among other things, that publications (in the old-school print tradition) are dying and "publications" are now going to be more blogs, in the mold of Discourse Blog and Defector.

The Verge piece said it like this:

So we sat down and thought about what was really important to us and how to make our homepage valuable every time you open it. We also thought about where we came from and how we built The Verge into what it is today. And we landed on: well shit, we just need to blog more.

So we’re back to basics with something we’re calling the Storystream news feed, right on our homepage. Our plan is to bring the best of old-school blogging to a modern news feed experience and to have our editors and senior reporters constantly updating the site with the best of tech and science news from around the entire internet. If that means linking out to Wired or Bloomberg or some other news source, that’s great — we’re happy to send people to excellent work elsewhere, and we trust that our feed will be useful enough to have you come back later. If that means we just need to embed the viral TikTok or wacky CEO tweet and move on, so be it — we can do that. We can embed anything, actually: I’m particularly excited that we can directly point people to interesting threads on Reddit and other forums. The internet is about conversations, and The Verge should be a place to find great conversations.

And deep down, while I know it's not the glory that was once Sports Illustrated or Esquire, it still sounds pretty good to me. A lot like the internet I remember when I was in my early 20s. So maybe I'll check out what Semafor and the Verge are doing more often, just to see if blogging is, indeed, back.