I’m on a hugeass project deadline for one of my major clients, I haven’t left the house since Monday, and at 8PM last night when I stopped working1 I went, “Oh what if I could build an old school blogroll to highlight writers/outlets I enjoy reading?”
I guess I could say something about the demise of Pitchfork but I don’t really have much to add. If you know me, you know I already have a lot of strong feelings about the decimation of news networks and the overall media environment, so to see one of the Big 3 (PF, SPIN, RS) bite the proverbial dust with this re-org is a huge loss. That on top of the personal connections I have to the site through people I know who worked or contributed to it (in addition to my own contributions2), it’s hard to watch my friends in media go through another clearing of an already thinned out forest. Not to mention that I’m pretty vocal about our over-reliance on third-party platforms to do the work of connecting us. I don’t need to add to the Greek chorus of “Please build your own website” (which you should).
The other day I joked on BlueSky that we should bring blogrolls back. For those of you under the age of 30 reading this3, a blogroll is a list of links to other sites. What’s distinctive about the blogroll is that it’s human-created—a very early form of mapping our social connections in the digital space. For folks like myself and others, they also served as way of discovering other places online.
The mess that is the fractured and decaying landscape of online publications is compounded by the fact that search engines are broken and the algorithm makes it impossible to independently stumble upon sites4. So, to me, it seems like we have to take matters of discovery back into our own hands. A blogroll seems well-suited to it.
So I did that.
Yes, this is a work-in-progress. No, it is not comprehensive (that’s where the, sigh, “curatorial” aspect comes into play).
I figured it might be fun to pull in a couple of the posts via RSS5. I don’t own the content, I have no control over its quality or recency—I simply thought it might be visually interesting for the page itself. Interestingly enough, what I discovered is that so many sites no longer have feeds6. Or many that do are broken. I suspect this started happening as mainstream interest in RSS died off when Google shut down its own Reader app, but it’s a shame. RSS is one of the easiest ways to build in “discovery” for your site/project.
So to those of you who are reading this that are working on projects, a request: Bring it back your RSS feeds. For your free users, for your paid subscribers, for unique sections or feature types.
I remain hopeful that independent media, in particular music journalism, criticism, and discourse, will bounce back. A million Substacks isn’t going to cut it. It is a matter of when and how that remains unclear (or no one’s told me about). But for those of us trying to build those bridges and connections, we can’t work with nothing.
Your pal/frenemy/whatever,
Maria T
- Believe it or not, but I have great work-life boundaries! I am very much a person who turns off the work machine at 5 o’clock sharp. But if you knew how major of a client this was and how much work is left to be done before an important milestone, this was my only option. I do this, like, once a year! ↩︎
- I contributed photographs to the News section for a bit. None of my assignments are still up there. ↩︎
- I am delusional—no one under 30 is reading this. ↩︎
- Literally heard someone complain the other day about how there should be algos on BlueSky and I had to RTdunk them. Sure, algos are good for somethings, but it should not be the default experience. I love having my reverse chrono feed back. ↩︎
- This site is built with WordPress, so there is a block in the editor that lets me import a feed. That, plus a text box, is all I am doing for each item on the page. ↩︎
- For those curious, I use Feedbro (haha ugh whatatitle) to see if it can identify any on the site. Despite the name, it is a good RSS reader and lets me read in the browser. ↩︎