Madison's Golden Age of Blogging

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.

(Nichole and JM look on as Jonny Hunter speaks at the Madison Interactive discusson on food and blogging.)

I also uncovered links to various Madison area blogs and a few blog rings and discovered that the vast majority of the blogs that I had bookmarked either hadn't been updated in ages or didn't exist any longer. Now that I am blogging again and look around at the local blogosphere, I have to say it is drastically different than it was when when Chris met JM and Nichole. These bookmarks were like fossils from a mere 15 years ago when blogging was ascendant and people were struggling to figure out what to make of it.

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).

I suppose that social media like Facebook and Twitter have superseded blogs. As JM also commented, "Now it's, now you're an influencer! Whatever the…" Today the mere idea of a "Madison Internet community" seems almost twee. But 15 years ago blogs were seen as a threat to legacy print media and it was interesting to watch them attempt to befriend blogs and adapt to the new situation. It's not that every blog was a goldmine of quality writing but a well curated list of blog posts provided some thoughtful commentary and often some fairly in-depth posts by subject matter experts. And it was all local, nothing pulled from the wire.

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.