Will definitely miss The Awl. It was a good looking site, in a quiet and non-flashy way. It had smart, funny people writing for it. Perhaps most importantly as a matter of culture it saw the pitfalls of social media and the Internet itself - technological triumphalism, excessive branding, the turning away from everything that can't fit on a tiny screen - and tried to combat it.
The Awl was partly developed by people who had also worked at Gawker. Gawker, of course, went belly-up because a horrid zillionaire had a grudge against it. As far as I know there was nothing so melodramatic as that in The Awl's ending. It turns out it's just really hard to keep a journalistic outlet going in an automated and memory-free world.
2 comments:
I was aware of the Awl's existence but not to the point of paying attention to what was going on there. It sounds like it was a pretty cool site for people who love and respect literature (you certainly being one of them). I did see a nice tribute to it on the Nation today. I liked the idea of doing reviews of the weather - a very droll touch.
Yeah, it's a matter of loving literature and also of being aware that there is and was more to life. Those two things go hand-in-hand, I think.
The weather reviews, yes! I've seen the byline of the guy who did those elsewhere. Which is good to know.
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