And as of today, they've now launched a...Tumblr...radio station...of music videos, AwlMusic.TV.  DJ'd by them, and run by Eric Spiegelman, he of Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Maybe it's just best to let them explain.

This went out today to those on The Awl's fortnightly email newsletter listserv:

So we all have dumb, regrettable New Year's resolutions, and one of mine was to bring back this fabled, sad, discontinued, ridiculous newsletter. Yes! This very one that you hold now in your inbox-hands!

Most of you will have changed your email addresses by now, and some of you will have moved on with your lives in different ways. Maybe you've given up your cats for babies, or moved to Patagonia (I always forget that's a real place!) or simply have just gotten off the Internet.

But for those few who remain, I salute you. I'm here too! And please be the first (and actually only) ones to be invited to Awl Music, a weird little project of ours with Eric Spiegelman. It's curated by guest DJs and ourselves, like a radio station, and it plays in random order our latest queue of favorite songs. (Yes, you can skip.) We're getting the jump on The Future here, when we all have Google TVs or whatever. But really? It's totally just for fun and giggles, and uses a dreamy interface. (You can also see it in action at Throw Your Media, where Eric displays all his favorite web films.)  It's technically a Tumblr even, so you can "follow" it like the kids do, from the "inside."

ANYHOO. We're just trying it out on the hush-hush. Just us chickens. So please bust out some headphones at your desk, see how it goes for you.

See you again next week? It seems likely! I'm going to ease into this. Nice and low volume. Only with cool things. (Though there might be something cool to send you tomorrow or Friday, so, you're warned.)

xo

Choire
The Awl

PS Don't be alarmed if this is all mangled or something. Think of this as a test email, really! If it all goes horribly wrong, we can laugh together. YOU'RE THE BEST.

The Observer opened up Awl Music to receive the sweet sounds of rapper Lil' B. We later came upon a "bump" of this bedazzled bear dancing:

Why the secrecy? It's all quite fun and neat! Give it a whirl!

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Ted Hall, in different states of OWS fervor.

Edward T. Hall III, better known as "Ted" to his friends, has become one of loudest voices on Occupy Wall Street. The lanky redhead with the neon-splotched hat looks vaguely like a Scream-era Matthew Lillard, making him easy to identify in YouTube videos of protests, where he can frequently be found preaching to the crowd in almost every single instance of arrests during the occupation of Zuccotti Park.

Before becoming a member of OWS, Mr. Hall made a minor splash in the tabloids, when he jumped a JFK luggage carousal in an attempt to get around airport security without I.D. and talk to a girl.

So why is The New York Times making him the poster boy for the protest?

Last Friday, The New York Times posted a video in its City Room blog, called "Opposite Sides of the Protest Come Together, Briefly." The video shows Mr. Hall discussing the movement with Jimmy Vivona, a stockbroker on Wall Street. The point of this get-together seems to be that Mr. Hall comes from money and a trust-fund (he's the grandson of anthropologist Edward T. Hall), whereas Mr. Vivona pulled himself up by his bootstraps to make a lot of money on Wall Street, yet it's Mr. Hall who is protesting as part of the "99%."

Isn't it ironic, doncha think?

Not for anyone who has done their homework on Mr. Hall, who has a history of general rabble-rousing. The first red flag in The New York Times article may be that Ted identifies himself as a "leader" of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a leaderless collective. He jumps in front whenever a camera is on, and can be found in numerous videos and articles about Occupy Wall Street. (He even does it in Spanish!) But that doesn't make him a leader, and it doesn't necessarily help the cause.

A source on Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly had previously told The New York Observer that Ted was often on the front lines, trying to incite police officers by screaming at them and leading chants against them. An early ABC video of the protests seems to confirm this analysis.

(Note: We don't know why Mr. Hall is identified as Collin Quinlivan in this video.)

He also doesn't seem to be completely in his right mind.

It seems odd that Mr. Hall has not gotten himself arrested at the protests yet, seeing as that would appear to be his main goal. He was quoted in Capital New York saying the Brooklyn Bridge protests were "the best P.R." the occupation could have gotten. He also is very well-versed in the psychology of protests:

"Counterinsurgency theory is based on securing peace in pocketed areas," he said. "Basically, you occupy the space and you protect the citizens from the insurgents. That's kind of what what we're doing. We're occupying a space and protecting the people from authority, from the police. And the more they fight us? The more they're seen as the enemy."

The jury is still out on Mr. Hall's ability to get others riled up enough to get arrested, but we wonder if a trust-funder with a history of being on the wrong side of police lines should not be speaking for the OWS movement as one of its leaders in The New York Times.

The resurgence of New York media over the past two years has been led by companies whose primary business does not involve words. E-commerce colossus Gilt Groupe and technology and data giants Bloomberg and Reuters lured top legacy media talent to their doors with pre-recession salaries and the sense of relief offered by a company for whom making payroll is not a routine emergency.

But on the other end of the media spectrum, a handful of entrepreneurial online editors have been striving to turn publishing quality content into a business model. Websites like The Classical, Rookie, Thought Catalog, and Los Angeles Review of Books talk the talk of Silicon Alley start-ups, but are founded on an editorial ethos rather than a technological idea. They seem to be led by the example of (and no doubt encouraged by the success of) former Gawker editors Choire Sicha and Alex Balk’s The Awl.

Launched in late 2008, The Awl carried on the hallmarks of the “good,” “old” Gawker even as Mr. Denton shed them. When Gawker corrected its New York media myopia, The Awl offered media commentary like Edith Zimmerman’s parodic “Letters to the Editors of Women’s Magazines” and David Parker’s “The Most Emailed New York Times Article Ever” (not to mention Mr. Sicha’s attentive coverage of masthead changes at this publication). After Nick Denton told The Observer that social media killed the ironic headline—so unclickable—The Awl’s headlines became deadpan to the point of obfuscation. “Man Gets Job,” The Awl recently tweeted.

In the fall of 2010, David Carr reported that the The Awl was bringing in $200,000 in revenue.

“I’m surprised that there aren’t a lot of independent, owner-operated editorial Web sites out there,” Mr. Sicha told him then.

A year later, they’ve begun to spring up, and several cite The Awl as inspiration.

Teen blog phenom Tavi Gevinson’s new web magazine, Rookie, had originally been slated to operate in partnership with Jane Pratt’s website, xoJane.com, but Ms. Gevinson pulled out at the eleventh hour. xoJane.com is published by SAY Media, and Ms. Gevinson wanted to own her own work. When the project went indie, Ms. Gevinson’s friends and collaborators turned to The Awl for advice, according to managing editor Emily Condon.

“We’re super thrilled that Tavi is being her own boss too,” Mr. Sicha wrote The Observer. “So punk.”

Like The Awl, Rookie’s overhead costs have come out the pockets of its friends and founders, but unlike The Awl, it has a key ad partner from the outset: the advertising sales team at New York Media, parent company of New York magazine.

Perhaps more important, Rookie needed to be independent in order to adhere to its editorial ethos, which, like The Awl, bucks conventional new media strategy and bets long on original content. “A lot of websites run on a system of having to get a post up every half-hour, and a lot of those end up being filler posts because they don’t actually have that much to say,” Ms. Gevinson told New York. “After being in all these meetings with publishing companies and advertisers and stuff, it’s like everyone just wants to trick people into reading their website. If the content is good, people will read it.”

Last month, a group of similar-minded if somewhat older sportswriters teamed up to launch an independently owned and operated website called The Classical, a home for ponderous long-form writing about sports and popular culture. It sounded a lot like the Bill Simmons’ blog Grantland, launched earlier this summer, but the entrepreneurs insisted otherwise.

“We’re way smaller, way more seat-of-pants, with no giant corporate funding (yet),” managing editor Peter Beatty wrote The Observer, noting that their plans hinge on attracting a dedicated commenting community that will also contribute.

“The Classical will be a running, wide-ranging conversation between us and our readers,” The Classical founders wrote in their manifesto. “Our model in this regard is The Awl, a site for which many of us have written and which all of us love.”

But the comparison ends there. Although the founders of The Classical (Bethlehem Shoals, Tom Breihan, David Roth, and Tim Marchman, among others) have many years of writing and editing experience, they lack the large online followings that Mr. Sicha and Ms. Gevinson have built up, which are immediately attractive to advertisers. Instead, The Classical asked its would-be readers, commenters and contributors to fund its first year, through the micro-philanthropy site Kickstarter.

They cleared the $50,000 hurdle—including a contribution from Mr. Balk—with more than a week left of fundraising.

Dissolving the line between producers and consumers of media has supported the growth of another of The Awl’s spawn: Thought Catalog. Launched in 2009 with a confident mission statement (“Thought Catalog is illuminating and informative… TC contributors are at the vanguard of their respective fields… We’re avant-now”), the site initially commissioned relatively well-known contributors and critics like Douglas Wolk, Molly Young, and Killian Fox, but soon opened its arms to unpaid submissions. A young editor, Ryan O’Connell, was hired to vet and edit them, in addition to publishing his own writing.

Mr. O’Connell developed a large following which did not just read him—it emulated him. Thought Catalog now has more than 500 listed contributors, the vast majority of whom have only written once or twice, and who, in aggregate, increasingly reflect an editorial penchant for millennial memoirs, semi-ironically packaged as service content (“How To Be My Boyfriend.”)

Thought Catalog’s style is an easy target for teasing Internet upperclassmen, but the site has four times as many Twitter followers as The Awl, and enjoys roughly three times the monthly visitors, according to QuantCast. Contributors share their articles, and comments often rival the posts themselves in length, driving the kind of writing-as-group-therapy social traffic more akin to Tumblr’s shallow reflecting pool than the competitive, reverse-chronological stream of Twitter- or news-driven blogs.

For The Awl, the pivot from scrappy start-up to model media player seems to have come in the form of the ability to pay themselves—which coincided with the appearance in Mr. Carr’s column. Spin-off sites focusing on humor (Splitsider) and women (The Hairpin), had just been launched, and a managing editor would be hired soon after.

Such organic growth was attractive to traditional media players. The Awl lost its founding publisher, David Cho, to Grantland—an ESPN property, albeit with its own similarities to the Awl—earlier this year. Its new publisher, John Shankman, has a more conventional marketing background. He comes to The Awl from The Huffington Post, but prior to that worked at Federated Media, which sells advertising for independent new media companies, including Digg and TechCrunch in their early days, BoingBoing, and The Awl.

He has come up with a marketing term for the ineffable editorial quality that’s inspired imitators.

“The audience that we attract is “indielectual,” Mr. Shankman told The Observer. “That’s the big challenge for us, ‘How do we scale smart?’ What’s happened in a lot of entrepreneurial media companies is they sacrifice quality for the sake of growth,” he added. “We’re not falling victim to that.”

Similarly, at the time of its launch, Rookie managing editor Emily Condon told the Observer that it was produced on volunteer labor, but planned on using future advertising revenue to pay contributors. This week WWD reported that Ms. Condon is headed back to her day job at This American Life. In searching for a replacement, she invoked the entrepreneurial appeal of the job.

“We’re brand new, but the growth potential could be really significant for someone willing to buy in and take a bit of a (calculated) risk,” she wrote in an e-mail obtained by WWD.

And for all The Classical’s lofty editorial ambitions—it will combine post-punk and critical theory—it has modest business goals. The $50,000 first-year budget is just enough to build up the website’s infrastructure and pay a yet-unnamed publisher a “nominal” salary to sell enough advertisements to keep it going.

Even outside the Manhattan media bubble, a group of academics and critics are united by an editorially entrepreneurial spirit. University of California-Riverside professor Tom Lutz launched a website for them this summer, the Los Angeles Review of Books. It aims to replace the long-lost Sunday literary supplements, which give academics a popular platform and were never fully supplanted by literary blogs. The University is an institutional sponsor, and the site collects commissions on any titles purchased through an affiliate independent online bookseller. For additional revenue, LARB plans to launch a book imprint and collect advertising revenue, gifts and grants.

“We hope to build an institution that will continue to function as a public service, having the best writers and artists responding to the best artists and writers, for years to come,” Mr. Lutz wrote The Observer in an e-mail.

LARB is perhaps most transparent about the fundamental earnestness underlying this wave of editorial entrepreneurs. It has by now surpassed that of the The Awl, which much of the time is a weird news and animal videos aggregation blog.

“We really are literary idealists,” Mr. Lutz added, “the whole lot of us.”

In addition to the celebrities reportedly involved (Miranda July, Winnie Holzman, Joss Whedon, Jack Black, Dan Savage and Fred Armisen), Ms. Gevinson actually hired contributors from the open call for submissions she posted on her blog almost a year ago. She received thousands of applications, according to Ms. Condon.

Following through on that promise is move that might have been harder to pull off at xoJane.com, where Ms. Gevinson was originally planning on publishing her teen-oriented content. Ms. Gevinson backed out of Sassy editor Jane Pratt's project at the eleventh hour (sans acrimony, Ms. Condon says) because she wanted to own her own work. xoJane.com is published by the jargon-happy marketers Say Media.

Rookie contributors include many precocious, self-publishing young people like Ms. Gevinson, as well as some pros, including xoJane.com fashion editor Laia Garcia, Girlcrusher Emma Straub, Girls staff writer Lesley Arfin, fashion blogger and Bon Appetit designer Elizabeth Spiridakis, Daily Intel blogger Joe Coscarelli and novelist Stephanie Kuehnert.

Rookie plans to pay contributors, managing editor Emily Condon told the Observer. New York parent company New York Media will exclusively sell advertisements, but there were no investors covering the overhead.

Friends of Ms. Gevinson are helping out pro bono, including This American Life founder Ira Glass, who performed with Ms. Gevinson at the Sassy magazine tribute, and his wife, Anaheed Alani, who is Rookie features editor. Ms. Condon is a This American Life alumna. (Ms. Gevinson lives in Oak Park, Ill., outside Chicago, where This American Life was produced for many years.) The Awl founders have also served as informal advisers.

Molly Young.

What makes a Molly?

Molly Lambert.

They were three exemplars of the value of a well-constructed personal brand, and each is now more than merely Internet-famous. Ms. Young contributes regularly to New York after leaving a job at the Daily; Ms. Lambert works for Grantland, where she now sticks images of celebrities between her paragraphs on ESPN’s dime; Ms. McAleer launched a women’s-interest site, HelloGiggles, with the actress Zooey Deschanel, and is a writer for the new CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls.

 

Molly McAleer.

I Gchatted a friend who works in finance to tell her I’d been assigned to write a piece on “the Mollys.” She replied “write it in the p.o.v. of edith z.” The Hairpin blogger Edith Zimmerman may be the Molliest of Mollys. She wrote bizarre and fantastical fake letters from women’s magazines for The Awl and ghost stories on her personal blog. She brought that brand of flustered, wacky pixieishness first to The Hairpin, the women’s interest site she edits, then to a GQ cover profile of Chris Evans. The piece, which was controversial even among the magazine’s editors, was more revelatory of Ms. Zimmerman’s half-self-deprecating exultation of her L.A. exploits than of anything Captain America had to say, in the same way that Molly Young’s New York articles sneak in turns of phrase like “weenie-tuggers” and “girl crush," and Molly Lambert smuggles fan-fic footnotes about how Kate Moss is like “the cool best friend who knows all the good shows and parties to go to and brings you” onto Grantland. Another freelance writer, Marisa Meltzer, posted a photo of herself doing the “hand-heart” gesture on her Tumblr after publishing a piece on the phenomenon in the New York Times Styles section; she also posted a picture of her bedroom, suggesting that she considered submitting it to a blog of teenage bedrooms though she is “aged way the fuck out” now. Mollyish writing hinges on a cute mashup of ingratiating cuteness (hand-heart! Weenie-tuggers!) and hard ambition (the Times! New York!), starring a narrator in on the joke.

Such is the appeal of Mollyism—especially to straight, male dude-itors—that the literary eye-lash batting generally manages to survive the delicate transition from personal blog to print. (Whether Ms. McAleer’s voice will make the trickier leap to TV remains to be seen, but examples like that of Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Meltzer indicates that the blog voice can thrive in print.)

According to Wired editor Bill Wasik, the Mollys are doing what writers have always done. “It's pretty common and always been common that you start with voicier writing in less established organs,” said  “and you move to better- established organs that pay better and you bring the writing, but you show that you can report out and structure and bulletproof a magazine feature.”

But voicey is one thing. The Mollys have taken to a whole other level. The intimacies of Tumblr have vastly amplified the confessional mode. As Maud Newton noted in a recent essay in the Times Magazine (which briefly employed Ms. Zimmerman as a web columnist), there’s a frantically conversational tone on social media: “‘Oh, hi,’ people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.” Ms. Newton phrased this as a universal concern--perhaps we're all a little bit Molly.

Tumblr happens to be a nearly perfect platform for showcasing a writer’s wry take or sharp attitude while requiring minimal effort. “Sometimes, you see a blogger where they’ve only written two sentences, but they’re really witty,” said Jezebel editor Jessica Coen. “Tumblr’s really easy to read and you can go through 100 entries in ten minutes.”

The coquettish particularities of Tumblr as a platform—which encourages a sort of literary fan dance, in which a writer’s identity remains largely hidden even as she’s laying bare her interior monologue—invite a certain amount of projection from readers. Choire Sicha, proprietor of The Awl and a keen observer of the Molly phenomenon, noted over Gchat that “my problem is that digital presence is weirdly so obscuring? it's like, you look at someone's tumblr and you're like, what the fuck is your name? what's your email? where DO YOU WORK, HOW OLD ARE YOU?”

Near instant reader feedback also encourages a certain style of writing. “I remember the days of Tumblarity,” said Maura Johnston, music editor of the Village Voice, recalling an early feature of the platform that ranked users based on their readers’ devotion. “If I write something, I do hit the reload button to see if people have responded to it… it’s the blogger’s dilemma: you can work really hard on something that’s thought out and reasoned or you can post about ‘I fell in love today and this is why’—and that greeting card-ready stuff will triumph.”

“One of the things that’s been lost in this new, fast publishing age,” Ms. Johnston added, “is this grooming period for a lot of young writers thrown into the deep end after school. You see things like Thought Catalog”—the website full of glum young boys and girls curating confessions about themselves in a super-breezy tone—“and you don’t have people thinking about things. There are a lot of lazy constructions or lazy ideas.”

Which is not to say that there’s not considerable drive behind the cozy bed-head tics—just that the ambition is tempered by an appealingly easygoing quality. “Mollys just want to have fun,” Mr. Sicha pointed out. “That’s why they’re so endearing, even when they’re glum or emo or sincere… But they’re full of kicks.”

Mr. Wasik said that the kicks are hardly going to damage the writers’ credibility: “We're entering an era where it's not as if, if you want to write an essay for The New Yorker, they’re going to be freaked out by the fact that you have this Tumblr devoted to being funny or being silly. People get that writers have different sides to their personality.”

That presumes people can tell the Mollys apart. Ms. McAleer, the 2 Broke Girls writer, said: “It happens to me all the time—people say, ‘I read your stuff on Grantland every day.’” Molly is a memorable name, so people will assume that it’s all the same person.” She and Ms. Lambert, both of whom live in Los Angeles, are friends.

“We’ve all gotten emails for the other Mollys,” said Ms. Lambert. “It’ll go back and forth a few times before you realize it’s meant for someone else.”

Ms. Young, who lives in New York, stands apart, and declined an interview request. She told The Observer via email: “I just don't think that anyone gives a shit about me, even if I share a name with these cool people.” Super Mollyish thing to say.

And there’s always an up-and-comer. “No molly list now is complete with[out] molly oswaks,” Mr. Sicha told us via Gchat, of a writer whose work (“Mad Men’s Betty Draper Is A Real Bummer,” “The Melodrama of Miley Cyrus”) has been featured on Thought Catalog and in The Believer. “THERE’S A NEW MOLLY,” he told us. “MOVE OVER MOLLIES.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Miles Klee, a copy editor at The Deal, has sold his first novel to OR Books. Mr. Klee is, perhaps, known best for his literary writing on The Awl; he joins the likes of Chris Lehmann in jumping from pixels on the site to paper-and-ink.

A source at OR Books indicates this is the first book deal OR Books, a print-on-demand publisher previously written about in these pages as an early partner of Emily Gould's online bookselling venture Emily Books, has made with a first-time novelist. Today, Mr. Klee made a list on his personal blog of the rejections his short stories had received at the hands of editors.

Mr. Klee's former agent, Matt Hudson at William Morris, had left the business, Mr. Klee told The Observer, but had "ambitiously shopped it around to some pretty elite publishing houses."

Mr. Klee took his manuscript to OR Books himself. According to the query letter, Mr. Klee's novel, Ivyland, "is a black comedy set in a crumbling, post-empire New Jersey. Aidan and Henri, childhood friends who came of age in the last days of social conscience, now watch their hometown disappear, street by street, into the corporate holdings of Endless Nutraceuticals. Across Ivyland, a second duo, DH and Leviticus, find a rare moment of entrepreneurial inspiration as the country collapses around them: they take to the open road as traveling amateur cosmetic surgeons, blitzed on the anesthetic Hallorax gas that keeps their clientele comfortably numb."

We can't wait for the book party!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The Times mentions a few potential candidates for hypothetical buyouts: Gawker Media, Glam Media and Business Insider.

To find out whether there was any substance behind buyout speculation, The Observer decided to reach out to Business Insider's Henry Blodget, Gawker's Nick Denton and David Cho, publisher of The Awl. Here are their responses.

Mr. Blodget, who's currently having a little fun with The Times over his company's status, was fairly coy in resonding to The Observer:

I don't recall putting out a FOR SALE sign, but if someone pulls up at the curb with a truck full of cash, we'll be happy to chat with them.

Mr. Cho:

Our main focus is obviously to grow our business. I think if we found a partner or opportunity that would help us do that, then we wouldn't not be interested in pursuing something. Also, even if we were to enter into an agreement or even sell, we would still want to be actively involved in the way the business was run and managed -- which is pretty common for arrangements like that (see: CollegeHumor, Huffington Post, etc.).

In a follow-up email, we asked Mr. Cho if The Awl had already been approached by any buyers, to which he replied, "We've always garnered some interest from various people, but clearly we've yet to execute on anything."

Mr. Denton, meanwhile, flipped the script, saying he sees Gawker as more of an acquirer than a target:

We did look for investment at the end of 2008 when it seemed like the world might be ending. But we're not in the market -- except maybe to pick up a smaller site like we did Cityfile.

A representative from Glam Media has so far not returned requests for comment, but we'll update when we hear from them.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

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.