Teen Vogue's Andrew Bevan and Bryan Boy are besties at Jason Wu's runway show.

“We did a cover story on you—did you ever get to read that?” The Observer asked flamboyant blogger sensation, America's Next Top Model judge and jet-setting front-row fixture, BryanBoy (Bryan Grey-Yambao), before taking our seats at Yigal Azrouël’s spring 2013 fashion show on Friday, September 7.

"No, no!” Mr. Grey-Yambao replied uneasily, shifting from side to side in a colorful plaid Marni top.

We were referencing Jenna Sauers’s sensationally delicious article, “How Fashion Blogger BryanBoy Became a Front-Row Fixture,” which ran in The Observer’s February fashion week edition.

We had extreme doubts that Mr. Grey-Yambao had never read the exposé, which detailed his frivolous lifestyle, bizarre ascension to the top of the fashion blogosphere and mysterious background.

“Do you know anything about The Observer at all?” we pressed onward

“Yes, of course! Someone emailed me about working with you guys for fashion week coverage.” [Editor's note: And we never heard back!]

Seeing that we were making little progress we moved on to other senseless bavard that fashion week victims inevitably resort to when one must pretend to care about the redundant and endlessly egotistical parade of style.

“So you’ve been everywhere. What has been your favorite so far?” we asked.

“I really liked Jason Wu!”

Predictable.

“Peter Som is my favorite, I really love the python," Mr. Grey-Yambao continued enthusiastically and with considerably more ease than when we had attempted to interrogate him about The Observer’s profile on him. Fashionistas don’t like skeletons in their closets, they prefer Pucci and Céline; skeletons are best left for the runway.

“Tell us about Yigal,” The Observer asked, trying to add some relevancy to the conversation.

“He’s very contemporary and women can wear it on a day to day basis,” Mr. Grey-Yambao answered.

“How are you combatting the heat?” we questioned, sweat beading on our brow

“Drink a lot of water. I’m so thirsty! I drink a lot of water and try to sit and remain calm,” he said.

Lies! You’ve been escorted in a meticulously climate-controlled town car between each show. Try rushing from show to show on the MTA and clammy taxis.

Annoyed we retreated to our seats to be miserably bored by someone else.

Sorkin's hatred of bloggers, blogs, websites, forums, and pretty much anything printed on any material other than paper that isn't a manifesto devoted to his radiant brilliance has manifested in both his work and interviews plenty of times before.

But this particular exchange—with The Globe and Mail's Sarah Nicole Prickett—was an astounding display of glib, misogynistic, and slightly sociopathic jackassery, especially on behalf of a guy who could probably use the benefit of the doubt as far as People Who Write On The Internet go. Given that, you know, his last television project failed, and also, given that they keep uncovering the various ways he's recycled his own material over the years (from teleplays to commencement speeches), he could probably afford himself the benefit of the doubt.

And yet, this happened:

"Listen here, Internet girl," he says, getting up. "It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while." I’m not sure how he’s forgotten that I am writing for a newspaper; looking over the publicist’s shoulder, I see that every reporter is from a print publication (do not see: Drew Magary). I remind him. I say also, factually, "I have a New York Times subscription and an HBO subscription. Any other advice?" He looks surprised, then high-fives me. Being not a person who high-fives or generally makes physical contact with interview subjects, I look more surprised.

"I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five," he says. He makes me try to do it "properly," six times. He also makes me laugh; I’m nervous, and it’s so absurd. He loves it. He says, "Let me manhandle you." Then he ambles off, hoping I’ll write something nice, as though he has never known how the news works, how many stories can be true.

Inevitably, The Internet which he so loathes has natrually taken this moment and run with it. Meet Aaron Sorkin's least favorite Tumblr, Hey Internet Girl.

For example:

And:

As well as:

And so on. (Naturally, the entire site has already been copied onto a Buzzfeed post we won't link to, but if whole-hog copy-and-paste from them doesn't certify a meme on some level, what does?)

Aaron Sorkin may finally now realize that you reap what you sow, especially in the Age of Viral Content. Or he's just going to let this aggression build up and release it in the form of more long-winded speeches by The Most Heroic Fictional News Anchor Ever, Will McAvoy, or even worse, deify the blogger-hating Steve Jobs in his screenplay about the Apple founder's life.

We'd put the safe money on the latter of the two options.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Vile habit, that.

New York is pretty much a no-smoking zone right now, one in which all of us puffers are living in our own private Joseph Heller -- a world where it's legal to buy cigarettes and sometimes even smoke them, but where one finds themselves increasingly admonished and ostracized for doing so. Katie Couric, for instance, will tell you that you're not attractive if you stink of tobacco. Our dream woman, gone forever because we can't kick our nicotine fix.

And yes, we understand that it's a nasty, smelly habit. But you know what else is? Taking it upon yourself to be the self-righteous Thought Police for the "Smell Flowers Not Smoke" campaign, as UES blogger Reggie Darling has done.

At first, we were pretty sure that Reggie Darling's entire persona was a joke. There's his profile (on Blogspot!) that reads like an Awl satire:  "Saint Grottlesex/Ivy League somewhat-observant Episcopalian WASP living on Manhattan's UES during the week with a career in finance," before going on to talk about the Federal house he's restoring up the Hudson River Valley with his pug Pompey and spouse Boy Fenwick. (Or do we have that backwards?)

But the sometimes-New York Social Diary writer was not joking around with his 1,262-word Miss Manners missive on where it is and isn't appropriate to smoke in NYC. If you don't have a spare hour to be lectured, we've broken Reggie's Rules down into some basic points:

1.) Don't smoke indoors (even in your own home).

2.) Don't smoke in your own car.

3.) Don't smoke while walking outdoors.

4.) Don't smoke outdoors while standing near a building.

5.) "Confine your smoking only to areas and places where it is explicitly allowed," which limits you to outer space or New Jersey, since indoor and outdoor smoking is both  illegal and déclassé.

6.) Before lighting up, ask everyone in your immediate vicinity if this is okay with them.

a) If they say no, don't get "shirty" about it. Instead, grovel for their forgiveness, as  "their rights trump yours."

And most of all, remember: All animals are equal, but some animals that don't  smoke are more equal than others.

Mr. Sorkin's hatred of bloggers stems from an incident during his West Wing days, when he took to a Television Without Pity message board to defend himself against criticism, and was given a harsh shellacking on the board and in the press for doing so. He channeled this into a particularly wonderful episode of The West Wing. Since then, he's taken every chance he can to sideswipe the matter of these pesky bloggers who blog things (it's often argued that he wrote an entire film about his distaste for the democratizing nature of the internet, let alone the press he did for it), forgetting the fact that he still often takes to those same blogs to communicate with the hoi polloi whenever it's called for.

But even for him, this—from an Interview magazine Q & A with David Carr, a New York Times media reporter and the primary Times staffer featured in Page One, the documentary about the Times—is a particularly bad look.

Mr. Sorkin is discussing with Mr. Carr the matter of Brian Stelter, the other Page One protagonist who was hired by theTimes' media desk in 2007 after the acquisition of his television industry news blog TV Newser, all while he was still in college. A blogger, hired at the Times! One would think Mr. Sorkin, once considered a wunderkind of sorts for his play A Few Good Men, could relate.

And then, this happens:

SORKIN: And The New York Times felt that [Stelter] should be working there?

CARR: Yeah, which seemed like a pretty weird idea at the time. But he has become such an asset. We collaborate a lot. The robot part is that he moves his elbow and content comes out. While he’s chatting, he’s also tweeting and blogging—and, you know, I’ll think that’s cute, and then the next day he’ll be on the front page with a synthetic piece about the analytics of television or new media, which he also covers. If Brian wasn’t such a decent guy, I would actually slip something into his food or quietly suffocate him with a pillow.

SORKIN: I’m glad to hear he’s a decent guy who has the respect of his co-workers. So then I’ll speak to this idea more generally: I know when I read something in The New York Times that whoever wrote it had to be very good to get the job that they have. But I don’t know anything about the person who is blogging online. It’s an easy job to get. Anybody can be a blogger—you just set up a site and blog. But there isn’t the same kind of accountability. I mean, The New York Times makes mistakes—Jayson Blair, Judith Miller—but when it does, it’s a very big deal.

Not so much, but that—like Mr. Sorkin's erroneous and wide-reaching assessment of the action of blogging as the mating call of the bottom feeders of the entire internet and not as another format of writing (one quite celebrated at the Times), or his complete misunderstanding of the concept of "citizen journalism" by comparing it to "citizen medicine" —is, of course,  a different story, though not one Mr. Sorkin will ever read, since, of course, he's not so big on reading bloggers.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

That night Mr. Butler re-watched David Lynch's scriptless, surrealist epic (he saw it four times in one week) until the scene when Laura Dern goes through a window in Los Angeles and ends up in Poland. He did not sleep for several hours after that, though it was very late. Eight days later, still writing, Mr. Butler--a chronic insomniac--found time to move apartments and watch both Funny Games and Crumb, the documentary. He had written 34,689 words. That day, an email arrived in his in-box from Gene Morgan in Houston with the subject line "Project."

It read: "I know you're into a lot of different projects in the immediate future, so this may be more of a burden than a question, but I've got an idea for a site that I've been thinking about for a while, and I wanted to run it by you." The email explained that on the Internet literature suffers from lack of exposure and a concern over its legitimacy.

"I think the best way to combat that is through being professional as fuck, and classing-up what we do," Mr. Morgan wrote. "I think if it's fleshed-out correctly, it could serve as a hub for the community. Here is the url I've got on hold: http//htmlgiant.com."

The next day at 9:30 p.m., 40,000 words later, six pounds lighter and exhausted from lack of sleep, Mr. Butler finished the first draft of his novel. He'd get to the email later.

"The day Gene asked me to take part, it was like we'd both been thinking with the same brain apart and then suddenly bumped them back together," said Mr. Butler, whose then untitled first draft is now called There Is No Year and will be published by HarperPerennial in April. "I was trying to push my own stuff rather than get an agent to do it, and there was kind of a scene developing online where all these people were doing the same thing in their own town, blogging about it, starting their own little magazines. Gene and I were thinking the exact same thing: We need to get some of these people who are doing it in their bedrooms to all talk in the same place."

HTML Giant has become the blog for writers by writers. It was something new when it came out, less an aggregator of book chat or reviews of small presses--like Bookslut or The Millions--than a kind of round-table discussion among writers about fiction in the comments section. It has spawned a slew of imitators, such as Big Other, We Who Are About to Die and Trick with a Knife. A few weeks ago it reached its peak traffic: 40,000 unique visitors over the span of a couple hours.

"What books have actually gotten you wet or given you an erection?" asked Mr. Butler in a one-line post titled "Hornbook." The answers ranged from William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch to Nicholson Baker's Vox to the first Sweet Valley High book. "Who is the horniest writer?" he asked in another. Mary Gaitskill, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Roth and Michael Crichton were all mentioned, as was Helen Keller.

Longer posts can take on the quality of manifestos or rants, as when Mr. Butler enumerated dozens of items under the heading "Shit I Don't Like About Writers & Writing": "Stories," read one point, "involving relationships, sex, dialogue, magical animals, magic at all really that presents itself as magic, metaphor that presents itself as metaphor, metaphor at all really, party scenes, band scenes, scenes that connect the dots, scenes that pretend like they aren't connecting the dots, exposition I could have figured out on my own, stories about illness that are actually about the illness and don't have shit in them, dick jokes that don't involve the dick being slathered or crushed."

Mr. Butler calls the site a "ball of energy" and his novel a "connective field." It opens with an image of an "ageless eye of light" suffusing the air above the Earth. That the rhetoric Mr. Butler uses to describe his life online is so similar to There Is No Year is no coincidence. The book's structure recalls the stacking of information and ephemera of a Web site. The novel is a series of images stemming out of the book's opening sentence: "The father and the mother sat close together without touching." To say the book is "about" something would be as futile as a plot summary of Inland Empire. Like that movie, there is no script, so to speak. The novel lacks dialogue. Characters have no names nor are they developed in any conventional sense of facing a problem, overcoming that problem or failing to, and then coming out changed for better or worse. There Is No Year is a rickety sculpture of images piled atop one another, all centered on a family in a house that resembles the setting from another of Mr. Lynch's films--Lost Highway. A lot of ink is spent on characters walking down dark hallways, falling into giant anthills beneath boards in the floor, discovering their bodies to be entombed in piles of hair.

At the climax, a character discovers a box filled with sheets of paper and a stack of photos of 43 deceased artists: Antonin Artaud, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Bruce Lee, ending with David Foster Wallace. The names are arranged on the novel's pages into a column, each with a footnote containing the details of the person's death, their meaning crushed beneath the weight of such finality ("Antonin Artaud died alone, seated at the foot of his bed, holding his shoe"; "David Foster Wallace died with a massive and uncompleted manuscript found bathed under light in his garage"). The images frighten and blister, moving forward recklessly but never once suggesting a beginning, middle or end.

"A lot of books and movies, people want to know an answer," Mr. Butler said. "But as soon as you answer that question, who cares?"

The novel could only come out of the mind of someone whose full-time job is to be on the Internet, another collection of words and images with no conceivable beginning or end (and definitely no answers). Mr. Butler, who earns his living as a freelancer, mostly writing about poker online, said he's "basically been in front of the computer for 10 years." He broadcasts himself through a variety of mediums, from his personal blog to his hilarious, often uncomfortable Twitter feed, which sometimes recalls the hazy, nightmarish sentences of his fiction ("Burped so slow & deep just now it was like vomiting into a cave full of vomit, which is what a day is"). Like Mr. Butler, his contributors have been experts at sharing and over-sharing their thoughts publicly for years, creating their own communities of followers, which helps explain HTML Giant's quick rise since Mr. Morgan's email less than three years ago.

"I was on LiveJournal!" said Roxane Gay, who has written for HTML Giant since the beginning and chronicles on her personal blog everything from trying to lose weight to being interviewed about over-sharing by The Observer. "To be honest, I'm completely delusional. I pretend nobody is reading what I write on the Internet. But with HTML Giant, I blog about things I'd like to talk about with a larger group of people. It's basically a love story. It's all these really smart people trying to show off for other really smart people, but not in an obnoxious way. It's just a bunch of word nerds. It fills a really big void."

It is hard no
t to look at Mr. Butler as a new kind of fiction writer, one who defies the archetype of the guarded figure alone with a manuscript in a room filled with books. It's not just that talented writers can be open about screwing around on the Internet like everyone else, but that his blog, his Twitter, his novel and HTML Giant are all continuous with his persona as a writer, all working toward a single style. They cannot be separated.

"The idea of the writer at all has become overrated," Mr. Butler said. "To think that you're this orchestrating wizard and that you have to have this story to tell and you have to have lived and seen crazy shit to be able to put it out there is absurd. To me it's just as crazy or scary or fucked up to go outside to the grocery store. You know? I feel like going out into the world, you just never know. You never know anything."

Finke has more to worry about, perhaps, than a photograph. She's been keeping remarkably busy as editor of Deadline and its awards-season print publications, conceived of by marketing professionals and not a Finke passion project: "Parts of it are like crawling through barbed wire--you're doing a lot with very little." Both the site, though, and the print edition are doing well, Finke says, though working with small staffs (Deadline's print edition works with a freelance art director and copyeditor; the website has settled on a new editor in Los Angeles and "very senior" reporter in New York, to begin after March 1.)

Until then, it's a daily grind for Finke. Since last Sunday night, during which she liveblogged the Super Bowl ("On the other hand, no one couldn't love dogs cooking and serving Bud Light"), wrote about AOL's Huffington Post acquisition, and posted without comment new movie trailers debuting during the game, Nikki Finke has been nearly entirely silent on the site. John Cook at Gawker wrote that she was particularly nervous and incensed about The Daily's plan to publish an image of her, though she contradicted that in interviews with Cook and with the Observer.

On Monday, Finke published, under her own name, three items: a video of the Writers Guild Awards in Los Angeles, an anodyne report on the delayed release of Mel Gibson's film The Beaver, and a strongly worded takedown of Michael Moore. On Tuesday, she published a long item on the next James Bond film--an item co-bylined by Mike Fleming and running under Fleming's New York vertical; on Wednesday, Finke embedded the trailer to Disney's Prom with a sentence about its provenance ("This is the first movie release which Walt Disney Studios Chairman Rich Ross greenlighted."). That makes five items in the first three days of this week (Finke has not published anything yet today).

Television reporter Nellie Andreeva has posted seven items so far today, sixteen Wednesday, fifteen Tuesday, and fourteen Monday. New York-based Mike Fleming has published seven items so far today, six Wednesday, fifteen Tuesday, and six Monday (counting his lengthy shared byline with Finke.)

The act of quantifying such numbers is unusually different as the site's bylines do not act in a traditional fashion--Fleming's links to the "New York" vertical, which contains various authors' work. Andreeva's name is in plain text and does not link to anything (Andreeva, when asked about her status and schedule at Deadline, declined to comment). Finke's links back to the Deadline Hollywood vertical. (A search for an author's name is similarly ineffective.) Perhaps it's all irrelevant, as Finke runs the site, though her famously snarky and vituperative voice, as evoked in a 2009 New Yorker profile, defines only her own work there, and even then only sometimes. "I didn't want Nikki clones," said Finke. As for strong reactions to her style--and her--Finke has her own theories for her unpopularity, referencing the Internet's aversion to strong-willed women: "I think people"--she interrupts herself, to talk to what sounds to be a cat, "you are the cutest!"--"I don't know why. They're people who don't know me."

Not everything gets a reaction, even from Nikki. By this time last week, Finke had posted eleven items, but they ranged from repurposed press releases to the classic Nikki-as-perceived bemoaning Justin Bieber ("Please, just kill me now"). Her schedule fluctuates (she said she was closing an issue Saturday, and further told the Observer she'd been on vacation to Hawaii in September and Mexico during the holidays: "I have a life, you know") but perhaps something was different this week. Maybe it was just the attention this so-called "private person" was getting. Another phone rang while the Observer began to form a question. Finke made frustrated noises. We let her go. She called back. Her first question: "Can I ask what you're going to write?"

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Ah! But! Surely they aren't so McDonald's-sized now?

"Well, the McDonald's reference was from five years ago--when I was downplaying the revenue potential of blogs," he said, then paused for exactly one minute. "Things did move on from then."

Whatever blogs have become, there seems to be universal agreement that the format that made them ubiquitous--the reverse-chronological aggregation accompanied by commentary--is not long for this world, and Mr. Denton's scoop-friendly redesign would seem to be the best evidence of that. In fact, the decline of the blog has come so quickly, one has to wonder whether we ever really liked the medium at all.

"From the beginning, I didn't call the sites 'blogs,'" said Dan Abrams, who launched his Mediaite network in 2009. "And that's true because I always had this vision of them being more than just advertising-supported, ah, well, blogs. You know, whatever the word is."

"What is blogging?" asked Lockhart Steele, publisher of the Curbed network. "Is what Capital New York is doing, do you consider that blogging? Well, yes and no."

"It always has been an embarrassing word," The Awl's Choire Sicha said. "First it was embarrassing because bloggers were these dirty, horrible people, and then it was embarrassing because our grandmas have blogs, God bless them."

The reluctance to even talk about blogs may have sprung from the fact that our early enthusiasm for the medium was, in the clarity of hindsight, based entirely on hypotheticals. Blogs were meant to offer untrammeled personal expression. They could turn elections. They'd straight-up murder newspapers! Oh gosh, remember The Printed Blog?

We even thought that owning enough of them could turn a tidy profit. In 2003, Google both debuted AdSense and purchased the Blogspot blogging platform, symptoms of the business model based on the notion that ads could target a vast audience of niche readers. In 2004, Jason Calacanis launched a blog dedicated solely to the goings on of satellite radio. "Howard is moving to satellite radio, so it's a done deal," he wrote, excitedly, in the launch's press release,

"We were certainly much more casual about launching sites," Mr. Denton said of those days. "As soon as we had a name and a concept, we just launched."

Somewhere between the business and personal sides of the blogging bubble were of course the bloggers themselves, sometimes pajamaed, often scoop-wielding and truly witty creatures that occasionally danced across the cover of your New York Times Magazine. If bloggers back then were no less reviled, they were at least objects of curiosity.

When the micropublishing model flopped, the game soon turned to going bigger--in this period, Gawker reversed its ban on reality stars, among other measures, to grab more readers--competing for the largest audience in the areas, like gossip and media, known to be successes. Sites like Business Insider and Mediaite popped on the scene to compete for those ever-inflating ad dollars, and this called for more bloggers.

Soon every 22-year-old with a "Sarah Palin" Google alert and a dose of irony fancied himself the next Alex Balk. From the story selection to the sarcastic or hyperbolic headlines, blog content became predictable, and duller for it. It's the sort of thing that can lead a good blogger to feel undervalued.

In his November farewell post, after a five-year stint on the Atlantic blog, Marc Ambinder wrote that it will be a relief to head to the National Journal, where he will feel no compulsion to turn every piece into the opinion of "a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."

"You're competitive in terms of getting something first, and then you're competitive on getting a take that is close to the truth so much as it can be approximated, and then you're competitive in building and keeping an influential and broad-based readership," Mr. Ambinder told The Observer, speaking with exhaustion of his time on the Web. 

With the Jason Kottkes and Andrew Sullivans already established and still working, he added, it's become increasingly difficult to carve out a niche.

"We're at a stage now where that market is saturated, so it's the long tail phenomenon. We're getting to the point where it's really, really hard once you start, unless you're a phenomenon or something," he said.

This saturation of opinion dripped into the personal blogging sphere as well, with Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter becoming the preferred mode for oversharing, the sharing sort of being the point, and aggregation.

To establish the very basics, the personal blog took the form of a passive Web site that offered a glimpse into one's inner life to anyone interested, whereas these networks broadcast these thoughts to friends, who would presumably be best suited to receive them, and who in turn used these networks over the others, without having to trudge through, say, Wordpress.

"The purpose of it is just pretty different," said the Web guru Rex Sorgatz, who recently gave up his personal blog for a Tumblr. "Because I see the audience and I know who they are, see who they are. I talk in a completely different way and post pictures of my dog and make jokes about people without linking to them because everyone knows who I'm talking about. And certainly it changes the way you talk about things."

The astounding amount of traffic passed to Web sites from social networking would seem to discredit the idea that people actually like having their news surrounded by lame jokes. Also indicative of this is the strange occurrence of aggregation-only Web sites--blogs that have been stripped of their writing. Mr. Sorgatz has worked on a few recently debuted versions of these, and notable among the established sites are the newer efforts of the Memeorandum family, like Mediagazer, which offers algorithm-based curation of media gossip.

Then there is The Atlantic Wire, the stripped-down aggregation service from a company that frequently touts its Web presence, which will soon relaunch under former Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder with 15 new employees in New York.

According to Mr. Denton, the "pendulum has swung," and it's become more viable to profit from this spate of aggregation, which he arguably prompted, rather than attempt to compete with it. His new goal is to make sure the entire Web sees whatever scoops he has to offer. Rest assured that the next time Tom Cruise uses a new Apple product to send photos of his penis to something that washed up on Montauk, it will be in your RSS feed as soon as it's splayed across the Gawker marquee.

Still, even knowing the logic behind it, the Gawker redesign is jarring. Just one story is featured on the home page at any given point, and the vast majority will not be exclusive by any stretch of the imagination--past examples seen on its public beta have included a guide to flying tipsy and a chart examining Charlie Sheen's publicity value for porn stars. It's sleek to be sure, but there are shockingly few links, and that's somewhat unexpected coming from the man who codified the blog format.

What happened to the famed "snarky" Gawker take on the news of the day?

"Well, that will be there, of course," Mr. Denton said. "If anything, in splash story, more obviously there, i.e the most pungent of stories will be the ones that get the most play on the front page. Writers will have to ease up on irony in headlines--because they will no longer have the lede to clarify. But that's already been happening--because so much traffic comes from headlines distributed on Facebook and Twitter."

"Social media killed the ironic blog headline," he added neatly.

None of this is to say that Mr. Denton's model is the way ahead for all blogs, least of all because he generally boasts around 20 times the traffic of any of the other sites mentioned here — with the exceptions of Mr. Sicha's sites, which do more, and Mr. Abrams' sites, which do still more. But his emphasis on original content has already been in the ether, in a proportionally smaller degree, on the more forward-thinking blogs.

Some of these have been bullish on old-school scoops. Yahoo recently put together a whiz-bang team of reporters for its Upshot news blog, which regularly furthers stories with new details. It's a model that's been pursued by Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall from early on in the lifespan of his Polk Award-winning site and one that he's pushed aggressively, to the point where he's been outspoken in his recent decision to stop calling the site a blog at all. He now relegates the opinion-heavy personal posts, more in keeping with what he used to do in the early days, to the "editors blog" section.

"Over time, by design, the news section has grown dramatically, and the blog section is pretty much what it always was in terms of volume and in terms of footprint on the page," Mr. Marshall told The Observer. "It makes you a destination site. At a lot of different levels, you have stuff that no one else has. Sometimes it's a matter that you have a scoop or it's a matter that you have a consistent focus on a story that a lot of other people don't have."

"I think the story of blogging in the last couple of years or more, professional blogging, is that we all do a lot more original content," said Mr. Steele of Curbed. "I think by the dint of being local, that's something we've always done, but if anything, that's gotten even more important. We give more attention to that sort of stuff now."

The Awl network may be a notable exception of a new online endeavor that essentially follows the old blogging method, but Mr. Sicha noted that some of the site's more unique efforts have gained a surprising amount of traction.

Specifically, he referenced the flyaway success of their newest property, The Hairpin, which he credits to its editor, Edith Zimmerman.

"She's not aggregating blog posts about the thing that just came down the wire. She's making things, and I think one of the mistakes that a lot of blogs make that kind of dead-end them as blogs is covering the same thing that everyone's covering instead of like creating things and stopping to make stuff," Mr. Sicha said. "I really feel like she renewed this idea in me that this should not be about covering Keith goddamn Olbermann. This should be about engaging with the thing that most fascinates me or cracks me up at 2 in the morning."

If the freedom from the opinion-based aggregation model has freed blogs of their point of origin, and less savory aspects, the short-form personal blog may well encourage longer extracurricular writing. In Wired last month, Clive Thompson argued just this point. "Ten years ago, my favorite bloggers wrote middle takes--a link with a couple of sentences of commentary--and they'd update a few times a day. Once Twitter arrived, they began blogging less often but with much longer, more-in-depth essays," he wrote. And when someone does decide to weigh in on Mr. Olbermann in a substantive way on a personal blog, à la Sady Doyle on Tumblr, the networking aspects of the new blog formats ensure that the post will be read.

As for Mr. Denton's redesign, it's unlikely that many other blogs will rush to copy the visual format, with its paucity of links. Mr. Steele went out of his way to praise the traditional blog appearance over any innovation because of the reader engagement it encourages.

"I contrast that to the homepages of, let's say, magazine websites, where there's an internal consistency, as in the magazine understands why the box on the upper right corner changes every week and this right over here changes every day and this over here changes every hour, but the average reader has no idea what's new," he said.

"The thing about blogs that's great is that if you arrive at a blog, you know immediately how to read it," he added. "Once you've learned to read one blog you can basically read every blog."

dduray@observer.com

Update 7 p.m., 2/1:

An earlier version of this article stated "None of this is to say that Mr. Denton's model is the way ahead for all blogs, least of all because he boasts around 20 times the traffic of any of the other sites mentioned here. But his emphasis on original content has already been in the ether, in a proportionally smaller degree, on the more forward-thinking blogs." It was corrected to account for Mr. Abrams' sites.

Update 12:30 p.m., 2/2:

Further updated to account for Mr. Sicha's.

Update 11:30 a.m. 2/3:

The earlier version referred to Mr. Sorgatz as a "web developer." His worked has moved into other areas in recent years.

Gevinson revealed the plans for the site in a note posted on her blog Friday. 

Pratt's prior magazine ventures Jane and Sassy were both praised as antidotes to the shallow materialism of other women's titles. Jane and Sassy helped Pratt develop a devoted following among women who came of age during the late nineties and early aughts. Jane began in 1997, it was named after its creator. Pratt left her eponymous magazine in 2005 and cited "wanderlust to do new things" as the reason for her departure. Jane folded almost exactly two years later. 

Sassy, which ran from 1988 until 1996, brought Pratt together with her teenage protege. Gevinson was born the year before Sassy ceased publication, but she became familiar with the magazine through back issues and blogged about the need for a similar title for her generation. Pratt found out about Gevinson's admiration for Sassy and sent the young blogger an email. The pair eventually met in person and hashed out the idea for "a magazine for an audience of wallflowerly teenage girls."

According to Gevinson, the new project won't be an attempt to recreate either of Pratt's other glossies. 

"Of course, it won't be Sassy (or the rebirth of Sassy, or Sassy 2.0) and nor do we want it to be … The world has changed a bit in the past 15 or so years and that whole Internet thing happened, and this world calls for something different," Gevinson wrote.

For now, the pint-sized aspiring editrix said she could only offer "vague details" about the project, because it's still in an early planning phase. Gevinson and Pratt are hoping to move forward quickly with their as-yet-untitled magazine. In her note about the venture, Gevinson asked writers who are interested in being (unpaid) contributors  to send her samples of their work by the end of next week.

"We wanna get moving!" Gevinson wrote. 

Mr. Wise tweeted a fabricated news item about Ben Roethlisberger's supsension yesterday — "Roethlisberger will get five games, I'm told" — to see how many sports blogs would pick up the news without fact-checking. A few outlets, including the Miami Herald, took the bait.

Dan Steinberg, a fellow sports reporter at the Post who mostly blogs, stood up for Mr. Wise. "A big part of SBNation's mission is to steal our shit and repackage it — they take other people’s stuff too," he told Erik Wemple.

Mr. Steinberg added on a post to his blog that one misstep shouldn't overshadow Mr. Wise's body of work. "Getting athletes to open up like that while also having the writing skills to do these stories justice is a pretty unique combination," he wrote. Indeed!

Mr. Steinberg also apologized for his dig at the site SBNation (which is a start-up by the way).

Mr. Wise has apologized himself at length saying that the tweet was a "horrendous mistake." His statement continued, "I always say our worst moments should not define us — I just didn't think I'd be talking about myself." (Post media columnist Howard Kurtz also wrote about the tweet and the suspension).

It was all a joke and the punishment doesn't seem too severe. But Mr. Wise and Mr. Steinberg do seem to harbor real resentment about how sports bloggers use their material (their "mission is to steal our shit and repackage it."). That attitude feels very 2009. Beat reporters are the lucky few who get paid to report, and, at the end of the day, do they care much if bloggers are taking their work, so long as there's credit and a link? Everybody knows bloggers have limited time and resources to fact check. The only that fact Mr. Wise could have reasonably expected to demonstrate with his practical joke/experiment is: bloggers put a lot of stock in everything he writes.

There's also this, from Tom Scocca: "If the premise of your hoax is completely unfunny, a lot of people will believe you." 

The letter thanked protesters who had appeared at a rally to condemn the accused students before they were found guilty in a court of law.

“It communicated to a fair-minded person in Durham that the people who taught these guys believed they were guilty,” he said.
Mr. Johnson’s posts, on an academic blog called Cleopatria, formed the seeds of a personal blog he then launched to cover the case.
Called Durham-in-Wonderland, over the past year it has become an influential source for those skeptical of the case against the students, two of whom thanked him personally when they were exonerated by the North Carolina Attorney general last week.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Johnson, 39, who usually appears in photographs Tucker Carlson-style in a bow-tie, wore jeans and a loose white shirt. Sitting on his desk in a 1950s-era building was a copy of The News & Observer’s issue the day after the announcement, which he has held on to because it shows one of the accused students cracking a rare smile.
(Mr. Johnson, who traveled to North Carolina 12 times to cover developments in the case, blogged live from the suite where the players and their lawyers watched the press conference.)

“When I got hired my clients said ‘You’ve got to read this guy--he knows all about this case,’” said James Cooney III, a lawyer representing one of the lacrosse players. “I was shaking my head saying, ‘The last thing I need is a history professor telling me how I run a legal case.’”

But before long the blog became his first read in the morning, and he used information obtained by Mr. Johnson to argue for a change of venue.

The original ad from the “Group of 88” was taken down from the Duke website, but Mr. Johnson had a still-working link. He also reported that a woman who would become a staffer on the District Attorney’s re-election campaign had called for a crowd to burn down the house where the alleged incident took place.

People in North Carolina started talking to me. I mean I’m a professor, not a reporter, but you know, the blog broke a few stories,” he said sheepishly. “This was not my intent when the thing started.”

More than 500 posts later, Mr. Johnson is co-writing a book on the affair with National Review writer Stuart Taylor, due out in September. He plans to continue his blog at least through the June ethics trial of District Attorney Michael Nifong for, among other things, withholding exculpatory DNA evidence from defense lawyers.

Prior to this Mr. Johnson was most famous for a tenure battle that he fought and won. Denied tenure in 2002, he challenged the basis for it, concluding that colleagues had voted against him because he had been deemed “uncollegial.” The Board of Trustees for the City University of New York reversed the decision.

It appears that at least some of Mr. Johnson’s own experience prepared him to come at this story with an academic’s insider perspective, and a questioning attititude toward what he calls “Academic Groupthink.”

“This is one of the darkest episodes in the history of American higher education,” said Mr. Johnson, referring to the letter signed by those 88 professors. “These were people who seemed to me to have betrayed the profession. They were supposed to stand up for due process and instead they went after their students.”