🎵: Witch Doctor - Erykah Badu and The Alchemist
\nOver the weekend, I asked Gemini to examine the career trajectories of the authors in this 2019 Jezebel article by Soraya Roberts, which covered the ins and outs of the major conflicts that erupted over the feminist blogs.
\n(I am sad to hear that Soraya passed away last month. During her research for this article, I enjoyed discussing the technical details that created these spaces and how our collective work facilitated everything that came afterward, or didn’t. I know Soraya was hanging a lot of her career on this article and felt it was poorly handled at the time, speculating it was because the voices most implicated by the research now manage the levers of publishing.)
\nKnowing Google has the juice for search, including all the missing bits deprecated over time, I asked it what technical and social lessons were learned, assuming Gemini could treat that work like a portfolio and provide a business analysis with the full benefits of hindsight.
\nPer Gemini, links added by me:
\nLooking back at the mid-2000s, the feminist blogosphere achieved extraordinary cultural breakthroughs, but it also operated with distinct technical and social failings and prejudices. By treating cyberspace as a purely ethereal or detached realm, bloggers unintentionally reproduced offline power dynamics, a phenomenon known as the “digital twinning” of cyberspace.
\nViewed through a critical, retrospective lens, four major areas show where different choices around technology, institutional strategy, and social solidarity could have altered digital feminism’s trajectory.
\n1. Technical: platforms are not neutral\nThe early blogosphere largely treated technical tools (like WordPress, Blogspot, Google Search, and ad networks) as neutral pipes rather than profit-driven entities with embedded incentives. Bloggers built incredible social capital on free or cheap third-party services without owning the underlying code or digital infrastructure. When Web 2.0 shifted toward algorithmic feeds and centralized social media (Twitter, Facebook), bloggers willingly migrated their engagement to those platforms to chase larger audiences.
\nProtocol-Level Investment: Instead of relying on proprietary platforms, the cohort could have invested in building and maintaining independent digital commons, including federated software, cooperative hosting collectives and shared digital archives owned directly by the movement.
\nData Sovereignty: Early writers rarely anticipated how their essays, comment sections and personal narratives would be scraped, monetized, and eventually used as training data for commercial algorithms and search engines. Establishing strict open-source licensing (such as Copyleft or peer-production licenses) and sovereign archiving practices could have protected intellectual labor from platform extraction.
\n2. Reproducing social hierarchies online\n“Digital twinning” can mean several things in context, but in our case it refers to the way online spaces mirror (and often amplify) offline power structures like race, class, disability and educational privilege. While early blogs claimed to be radical open spaces, their structures often recreated corporate and academic gatekeeping.
\nMany of the highest-profile blogs were anchored by white, college-educated, urban writers who inadvertently treated their lived experiences as the “default” feminist lens. Marginalized writers, particularly Black, Indigenous, AAPI, disabled, and trans writers, frequently had to demand inclusion, fight for citation, or build separate spaces (Racialicious, Crunk Feminist Collective, Reappropriate, FWD/Disabled Feminists) to address the dominant blogs’ weak spots.
\nResource and Power Redistribution: Rather than treating traffic and ad revenue as individual metric wins, major sites could have operated as resource-redistribution networks—directly funding, platforming, and sharing domain authority with writers from marginalized backgrounds from the outset. This is what Feministe.us aimed to do with our rotating lineup of guests, with mixed results.
\nRethinking “public” vulnerability: The blogosphere heavily rewarded raw, highly personal exposure (“confessional blogging”). However, this cost was asymmetric: white, middle-class bloggers often parlayed personal exposure into book deals, while marginalized bloggers faced severe offline economic risk, doxxing and targeted harassment for sharing the same level of personal detail. Many of us also needed to earn a paycheck with benefits. Depending on your demographics, angles and timing, writing opportunities were limited, and only a small fraction of the talent generated in the collective saw durable career impacts. A more intentional approach would have prioritized pseudonyms, pen names, shared authorship, and safety-first rhetoric.
\n3. The siren song of individual upward mobility\nThe most consequential structural shift was how the blogosphere interacted with traditional media and corporate capital. As more corporate outlets (Jezebel, HuffPost, The Guardian) realized feminist commentary drove clicks, they offered individual bloggers lucrative staff jobs, book deals and column spaces. This transformed a collective political movement into a pipeline for individual career advancement. As top talent moved into legacy media, independent blogs lost the labor needed to sustain them.
\nBuilding cooperative media outlets: Instead of individual writers accepting staff roles at corporate outlets, the cohort could have formed reader-owned media cooperatives (similar to worker-owned publishing models today). This would have allowed writers to earn a sustainable living while keeping their intellectual output in a community-controlled space.
\nResisting algorithmic speed: Legacy media required bloggers to output somewhere between 3-10 quick, hot-take posts per day to satisfy ad-driven impression quotas. Resisting this pressure in favor of slower, deeper, “thick” theory would have preserved the intellectual rigor of the spaces instead of reducing feminism to consumable digital commentary.
\n4. Politics: Hesitancy to be the “fly in the ointment”\nBeyond technical tools and corporate pipelines, there was a profound rhetorical hesitation within many of the era’s flagship blogs to comfortably occupy the role of the “fly in the ointment,” the deliberate, disruptive presence that insists on disrupting false consensus to center genuinely aggrieved interests.
\nBecause major blogs faced constant, bad-faith attacks from right-wing media and anti-feminists, an implicit pressure emerged to project a unified “united front.” This often created an environment where internal dissent, particularly from disabled, working-class, trans, or non-white women pointing out the movement’s ongoing failures, was framed as unhelpful infighting or a distraction from the broader political battle. The push for a polished, accessible and broadly appealing “Feminism 101” frequently smoothed over the jagged edges of critique.
\nSanctifying disruption as methodology: The blogosphere could have explicitly framed the “fly in the ointment” not as a threat to solidarity, but as the primary engine of accountability. Rather than managing or policing internal conflict to maintain a clean editorial brand, blogs could have deliberately designed their platforms to hold open space for radical and uncomfortable grievances within the plurality of feminist thought.
\nProtecting uncommodifiable voices: Corporate platforms favor palatable, easily shareable commentary by design. By shying away from deeply uncomfortable, non-mainstream grievances, the blogosphere left a vacuum filled with endless explainers. A more resilient model would have actively protected and amplified the most uncompromising, “unmarketable” voices, including those whose positions could not be sanitized for an ad sponsor or a cable news segment.
\nBy failing to fully institutionalize the “fly in the ointment” as an essential, protected role within digital spaces, the early blogosphere left itself vulnerable to the corporate absorption that eventually dismantled it. When mainstream media stepped in, it easily plucked away the polished, palatable commentary while abandoning the uncomfortable, dissenting labor that keeps a political movement expansive and honest.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-21T13:25:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/21/witch-doctor-erykah-badu-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Gender","Platforms","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/15/media-on-project-lily-the.html", "content_html": "404 Media on Project Lily, the ChatGPT project where humans read users’ prompts – including sensitive and personal information – to better train the product.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-15T08:52:29-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/15/media-on-project-lily-the.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/06/cap-times-on-electric-heart.html", "content_html": "Cap Times on Electric Heart, the new EP by Madison songwriter Whitney Mann.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-06T20:56:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/06/cap-times-on-electric-heart.html", "tags": ["Music","Madison","Midwest","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/03/in-honor-of-gloria-steinems.html", "content_html": "In honor of Gloria Steinem’s passing (rest in power), an article on the business and activist tensions present in, and the long-tail value of, feminist publishing efforts. And a 2019 dissertation on organized literacy education as a civil rights effort. A trip to the bookstore is in order.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-03T12:25:45-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/03/in-honor-of-gloria-steinems.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Education","Gender","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/03/this-firstperson-essay-from-the.html", "content_html": "This first-person essay from The Baffler is circulating in writerly crowds this week. It’s a ripper and a must-read, enough to convert me to a print subscriber.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-03T08:46:34-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/03/this-firstperson-essay-from-the.html", "tags": ["Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/01/lux-magazine-on-the-return.html", "content_html": "Lux Magazine on the return of The Rumpus.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-01T17:15:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/01/lux-magazine-on-the-return.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/31/i-found-out-about-a.html", "content_html": "I found out about a hyperlocal newsletter in my neighborhood and had to share. The Monroe Street Tattler offers print delivery and email distribution, and reports only on the hard local news, such as dog walk water bowl locations and the best fries in the neighborhood, among other ephemera.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-31T09:09:48-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/31/i-found-out-about-a.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Madison","Midwest","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/09/a-cool-article-from-cap.html", "content_html": "A cool article from Cap Times on how language translation serves as a trust-builder for local government in an era of mistrust.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-09T08:23:54-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/09/a-cool-article-from-cap.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Madison","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/06/25/i-found-this-piece-from.html", "content_html": "I found this piece from an anthology celebrating 50 years of women’s studies, which explores the intersection of scholarship and publishing practices over time.
\n", "date_published": "2026-06-25T16:27:25-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/06/25/i-found-this-piece-from.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/15/after-listening-to-the-talk.html", "content_html": "After listening to the talk yesterday, I was reminded of this article describing a journalism model for using AI that shared some parallels with D’Ignazio’s research.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-15T19:55:58-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/15/after-listening-to-the-talk.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/28/some-initial-review-suggests-that.html", "content_html": "Some initial review suggests that a staggering amount of Substack content is written by AI.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-28T08:55:54-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/28/some-initial-review-suggests-that.html", "tags": ["AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/27/if-folks-want-quality-firstperson.html", "content_html": "If folks want quality first-person writing about age and aging, I highly recommend the newsletter magazine Oldster, which explores “the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.” Bonus: Oldster is run by Sari Botton, formerly the longtime essay editor of Longreads.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-27T14:13:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/27/if-folks-want-quality-firstperson.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/16/maris-kreizman-on-ai-pressures.html", "content_html": "Maris Kreizman on AI pressures building in the publishing industry, particularly how it impacts writers and editors: “It’s not an ideal environment for productivity, let alone for making art.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-16T16:21:27-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/16/maris-kreizman-on-ai-pressures.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/07/while-poking-around-for-some.html", "content_html": "While poking around for some examples of media coverage of the early blogosphere, I found this mention from the time Lisa Jervis of Bitch Magazine did a guest stint at Feministe. For context, Feministe hosted regular guest blogging seasons where we opened our comparatively gigantic platform to much smaller bloggers. What we didn’t pay in money, we could offer in audience and attention, with mixed results. Several people who guest blogged found the audience and attention experience terrible – which began its own media cycle.
\nThe reality is that having a platform on Al Gore’s unregulated internet means you face a lot of gross commentary from in and outside the proverbial house. Invitations for guest blogging were happily accepted, but the attention wasn’t reliably durable for writers and their goals. This reflection in Salon, “In Defense of Ladyblogs,” recaps what it’s like to have a massive platform on the open internet: “For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quickly.” This is a limited telling, but there are some nuggets here that forecast the commentary around Lindy West’s book – particularly around the pressures of being smart in public while also being a person who wants to be liked and included.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T17:10:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/07/while-poking-around-for-some.html", "tags": ["Gender","Blog History","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/01/an-observation-on-feminist-writing.html", "content_html": "An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.
\nSome thoughts:
\nBeing a writer for pay is an unusual and vanishing proposition, according to Baffler. “Fifty-six percent of the respondents rely on side jobs to survive.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T12:20:15-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/01/being-a-writer-for-pay.html", "tags": ["Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/29/looking-at-early-feminist-blogs.html", "content_html": "Looking at early feminist blogs and how they previewed the social critiques and economic problems present within today’s attention and publishing economies. What is old is new again.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-29T12:35:47-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/29/looking-at-early-feminist-blogs.html", "tags": ["Gender","Blog History","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/27/from-anil-dash-on-why.html", "content_html": "From 2024, Anil Dash on why everyone needs to rethink Substack.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-27T17:09:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/27/from-anil-dash-on-why.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/18/im-watching-the-feminist-writer.html", "content_html": "I’m watching the feminist writer scene go hard on some recent books: Jamilah Lemieux’s Black. Single. Mother. and Lindy West’s Adult Braces.
\nBoth books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. Incidentally, they come from the same cohort we loosely refer to as “feminist blogging,” though both would probably bristle at the description. And both use autoethnographic methods to leverage their personal lives to tell bigger stories about social, cultural and economic dynamics (a common method among feminists, where the personal is often made explicitly political). Lemieux goes further by including a series of essays by other Black single mothers at the end of her book, expanding the frame from memoir into something more collective, a full bloom.
\nWest’s book has gone ultra viral over the last few weeks while Lemieux’s has found significantly less footing. West’s work is being spectacularized in real time, while Lemieux’s support has been mostly grassroots, respectful (thankfully), and largely limited to Black media outlets and NPR. This reproduces one of the oldest patterns in feminist media: a white woman’s confessional work circulates as universal or spectacular (West is being treated like a spectacle currently, which is great for sales and visibility but comes with negative trade-offs), while a Black woman doing rigorous, arguably more structurally ambitious work gets categorized as niche, an outlier. That this is happening within the very audience that would generally name and critique this dynamic in any other context makes it worth sitting with.
\nWhile I respect both authors and their bodies of work, I am looking forward to Lemieux’s book because I know firsthand how difficult it is to get a publisher and an audience for serious, foundational work like this. I suspect it will prove relevant long after the viral moment is over.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T17:00:36-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/18/im-watching-the-feminist-writer.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Books \u0026 Reading","Gender","Platforms","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/interesting-read-nyt-is-using.html", "content_html": "Interesting read: NYT is using a custom LLM tool to track trends within the “manosphere,” as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T18:37:15-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/interesting-read-nyt-is-using.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/a-friend-of-the-blog.html", "content_html": "A friend of the blog told me a story about a Substacker who uses AI to summarize books and then publishes AI-generated content about those summaries, never reading the books herself, and yet has a ton of followers. I’d guess at least some of those are purchased, betting that a high follower count will beget more followers by suggesting clout and credibility she didn’t earn as a reader talking to fellow readers. And followers aren’t subscribers, but that’s the business bet.
\nPeople are lookie-loos, they get curious when something is doing numbers and creating activity, so inflating follower counts is a real and persistent strategy. None of this is new. But best practices still hold regardless of which technologies you layer on top. Marketing erodes trust when it prioritizes short-term gains over honesty and reliability.
\nIt’s strange to live in a time when you can’t reliably distinguish someone who has engaged with ideas from someone who automated the appearance of engaging with them.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T18:29:45-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/a-friend-of-the-blog.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/brooke-warner-grapples-with-the.html", "content_html": "Brooke Warner grapples with the implications around authorship and ownership in relation to AI writing, and how it’s showing up in the small publishing business.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T12:51:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/brooke-warner-grapples-with-the.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/thinking-more-about-arxiv-and.html", "content_html": "Thinking more about arXiv and public-facing publishing: Back in the day, my mentor was among the first on campus to successfully argue that public-facing publishing should count toward tenure, as service and outreach at minimum. She was on the edge of digital studies, and by the time her work was formally peer-reviewed it risked being irrelevant. At the time, in the early 00s, blogging was the primary mechanism to get the job done, and peer review happened online in real time through interaction with other scholars. This also foreshadowed the “influencer” model that we know today – by cultivating interest and influence through these more informal channels, their formal work gained traction in formal channels.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-07T17:07:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/thinking-more-about-arxiv-and.html", "tags": ["Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/05/a-thorough-look-at-the.html", "content_html": "A thorough look at the loss of institutional hip-hop media archives and what it means for culture writing today.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-05T20:24:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/05/a-thorough-look-at-the.html", "tags": ["Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/ryan-broderick-is-currently-my.html", "content_html": "Ryan Broderick is currently my fav reporter on the Internet culture beat, and on this podcast he’s talking about Epstein and why he was interested in putting his resources to developing the early internet (spoiler: for crimes).
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-04T08:40:43-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/ryan-broderick-is-currently-my.html", "tags": ["Tech","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/21/my-friend-dave-bangert-has.html", "content_html": "My friend Dave Bangert has been a Midwestern reporter for thirty years, and began his own newsletter project after layoffs and mergers emptied his local newsroom. Now his 8000 subscriber project is a major influence in a Big Ten town that otherwise has a weak media market. In this podcast he talks about how it all works, what we lose as legacy media dries up, and what it means when your readers know exactly who you are, and you run into them in the produce aisle.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-21T11:16:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/21/my-friend-dave-bangert-has.html", "tags": ["Midwest","Platforms","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/09/a-survey-of-authors-on.html", "content_html": "A survey of 1200 authors on how they are thinking about and using AI
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-09T09:42:27-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/09/a-survey-of-authors-on.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/05/the-reporter-who-tried-to.html", "content_html": "The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-05T23:03:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/05/the-reporter-who-tried-to.html", "tags": ["AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/19/media-on-wikipedia-reciprocity-and.html", "content_html": "404 Media on Wikipedia, reciprocity and collaboration online, and how to protect the public commons in the age of AI.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-19T23:21:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/19/media-on-wikipedia-reciprocity-and.html", "tags": ["AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/08/nieman-labs-predictions-for-journalism.html", "content_html": "Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2026
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-08T16:49:57-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/08/nieman-labs-predictions-for-journalism.html", "tags": ["Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/02/substack-entrapment-theory.html", "content_html": "\n", "date_published": "2025-12-02T21:05:56-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/02/substack-entrapment-theory.html", "tags": ["Platforms","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/18/interesting-to-see-web-and.html", "content_html": "Interesting to see web and print magazines talk about their strategy and value proposition since Google adopted an A.I.-powered search feature. x.com/pastemaga…
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-18T13:23:42-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/18/interesting-to-see-web-and.html", "tags": ["AI","Search \u0026 Discovery","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/12/bookmarking-this-media-podcast-specifically.html", "content_html": "Bookmarking this 404 media podcast specifically because it discusses how librarians are navigating the rise of AI.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-12T07:54:08-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/12/bookmarking-this-media-podcast-specifically.html", "tags": ["AI","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/28/wisconsin-watch-profiled-the-pulaski.html", "content_html": "Wisconsin Watch profiled the Pulaski News, the newspaper of record in a ~3500 person village in northeast Wisconsin, run by high school students.
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-28T12:10:46-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/28/wisconsin-watch-profiled-the-pulaski.html", "tags": ["Education","Midwest","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/20/what-rivalry.html", "title": "What rivalry? ", "content_html": "Purdue Exponent students distributed 3,000 copies of a special “solidarity edition” newspaper in Bloomington after IU spanked their student paper for insubordinance, ending the IDS print edition and firing their director. The media landscape in Indiana is bleak, generally, after years of disinvestment, so student reporters fill a social and political gap that the free market left behind. Given those conditions, the wider community depends on student media, much like public radio, to fill the information gaps. Also, these campuses are situated in communities where it can be very socially uncomfortable to be a squeaky wheel. So. As alum, I’m proud of the Exponent for this brave and newsworthy show of heart. 💐
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-20T21:43:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/20/what-rivalry.html", "tags": ["Midwest","Platforms","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","First Amendment"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/02/10/a-trustbuilding-exercise-in-an.html", "title": "⚡ A trust-building exercise in an era of \"flooding the zone\"", "content_html": "While institutions are backing away from making position statements, news outlets are making lengthy statements of intent. This one from Madison is interesting because it also acknowledges that a portion of their audience may be intentionally avoiding news about the White House. This is a traditional trust-building strategy applied in a new way: explaining how the news outlet plans to allocate their resources in an era of “flooding the zone.”
\nIsthmus: isthmus.com/opinion/f…
\n", "date_published": "2025-02-10T13:45:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/02/10/a-trustbuilding-exercise-in-an.html", "tags": ["Madison","Midwest","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","First Amendment"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/06/03/from-the-garbage.html", "content_html": "From the Garbage Day newsletter, my fav newsletter on internet trends and marketing, this blog post on looking for federated blog alternatives to Wordpress which links out to this handy dashboard measuring total users on federated platforms.
\n", "date_published": "2024-06-03T14:04:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/06/03/from-the-garbage.html", "tags": ["Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Indie Web","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/05/29/two-new-media.html", "content_html": "Two new media publishers are looking to build out their presence in the Fediverse: digiday.com/media/why…
\n", "date_published": "2024-05-29T14:10:36-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/05/29/two-new-media.html", "tags": ["Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2023/10/26/my-biggest-complaint.html", "content_html": "My biggest complaint about the slow, excruciating car crash of Twitter/X is that all of my journalist friends moved to Bsky and all my geek friends moved to Mastodon.
\n", "date_published": "2023-10-26T12:09:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2023/10/26/my-biggest-complaint.html", "tags": ["Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Indie Web"] } ] }