The decline of The Stranger
Remember when the Stranger was edgy, fun, cool, and hip? Me neither, but remember when the Slog was a must-read local blog?
In the last couple months, I’ve basically stopped reading it. Yeah, Eli Sanders did some great work covering the last days of the P-I, and every once in a while one of the other authors comes up with a good article in a blind-squirrel-find-acorn way, but the rest of it seems to have crumbled from being humorous and ironic to being a cross between an angry teenage wannabe sensitive hipster and an angry teenage wannabe gay rights activist who thinks everyone else isn’t gay enough.
Here’s how I think the Slog’s content currently breaks down:
Current Slog post content, showing it's mostly Dan Savage being unreadable
You can see where the unreadability comes from.
At this point, the Slog can’t even cover Capitol Hill well anymore — Capitol Hill Seattle is running circles around them, natch, but it’s almost like they’ve forgotten they’re even on Capitol Hill.
It’s all about content, kids. And maybe turning the place into an Andrew Sullivan/Democratic Underground repeater station is working, but you’re gaining the whole world while losing Broadway and John. Push Dan off onto his own blog and get back to what you did well. Whatever that was.
agreed.
Also agreed.
cosign.
The unfortunate thing is that that sliver designated "everything else" on your perceptional pie chart represents a fairly decent number of posts on local news, politics, art, and food that seem to get buried in amid incessant rant of personality tantrums and predictable turns of opinion against formerly championed causes (iraq, monorail, etc.) for the sake of contrarianism.
The critiques of Obama’s slow movement on DOMA and DADT are certainly justified and heartfelt, though anyone who was paying attention a year ago (slog) could have predicted that an administration facing a collapsing economy, multiple wars, and a looming healthcare crisis would make some painful decisions about priorities.
Obviously, I know nothing about creating an addictive buzzmillion page-view blog that commands such widespread readership, but I would love to see that platform used to intelligently advocate once or twice a day rather than repeated foot-stomping. Then again, perhaps more rigorous discussions of the complicated issues for taking action — e.g., national versus state, legal versus legislative strategies, how the executive branch can act with and without the congress — don’t bring in compulsive commenters and regular advertisers.
Seafair time is here. I think you might need to redo the chart to cover the Blue Angels whining.