On Christmas Eve the final (for now, anyway) episode of The Corner Table was released. The Corner Table is (was?) a podcast devoted to "food and drink in Madison, Wisconsin" and was made under the aegis of The Capital Times, one of our newspapers. It was hosted by Lindsay Christians and Chris Lay and they were joined for their terminal chat by JonMichael Rasmus and Nichole Fromm, the proprietors of the blog Eating in Madison A to Z. In addition, they authored Madison Food: A History of Capital Cuisine.
Since the blog hadn't been updated since the spring of 2019,
it was nice to find out that JM and Nicole still walked the earth. Their absence
on the blogging scene was due in no small measure to the onset of parenthood**.
While most of the conversation explored the often (mostly?) ephemeral nature of
the restaurant business, there was another line of commenting that made me prick
up my ears.
At one point Lay relates that he met Nicole and JM via Twitter
some ten years beforehand. "That was back when you could really meet fun,
interesting random people on Twitter in Madison," he reminisces. JM adds,
"Something's been lost from sort of the early days of the Internet when
being on the Internet was interesting enough."
A few weeks ago I realized I had what can only be described
as a highly excessive number of bookmarks in my browser so I installed a Chrome
utility to help clean them up. During that process I came across a link to
Madison Interactive, "a group that has come together for the purpose of
sharing concepts of how best to utilize the Internet and how to strengthen the
Madison Internet community." The group, which seems to have been
associated with Madison's newspapers, hosted four panel discussions at the High
Noon Saloon back in 2007. One of those focused on music bloggers and I was invited to be on the
panel while another was about food blogging in Madison and was moderated by JM
and Nichole.
At that time Dane101 was alive and well and inviting people
to blog about Madison in addition to posting its "Breakfast Links" every
morning. It was simply a list of links, but mostly to blogs. Isthmus also
aggregated blog posts someone there found interesting and Madison Commons, a UW
School of Journalism site, also threw blogs into the mix at one time. And there
was POST, a paper publication that reprinted blog posts, from Madison's
newspapers (I think it was the pair of them).
But that is in the past. The closest we have today appears to
be an occasional collection of Tweets cobbled together as an "article"
giving the reactions of local Twitter users to some event, usually a Badger
game. Bloggers are no longer a threat to their business. Perhaps social media
are now.
The Golden Age of Blogging brought the professional media
together with the amateur and it made for an interesting mix. The papers have now
largely moved online. Indeed, The Capital Times no longer exists on paper.**** Podcasts,
photo groups on Instagram, Tweet aggregation, reporters with social media
account – the legacy media adopted many of the ways of the blogger and their
new media descendants but the amateurs are largely kept at arm's length these
days. Maybe for the better.
(**Congratulations to them!)
****Wrong! The Cap Times (as per the comment below) became a weekly print publication and so exists mostly online. As their site says, it "focuses its efforts first on its daily digital presence". I think that, when I was searching for those issues of POST, I came across the final broadsheet issue of The Capital Times and the final print issue of The Onion and conflated things along the way.
2 comments:
"Indeed, The Capital Times no longer exists on paper."
Indeed, the Cap Times prints and distributes a 40-page tabloid each Wednesday that features an in-depth cover story and several articles that have previously appeared online at captimes.com. Subscribers to the Wisconsin State Journal receive it and it's available in racks located all over town, including every grocery store and public library.
Thanks for pointing out my error. It has been corrected.
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