What Discourse Blog Means To Us

It's our fourth birthday!

On March 23, 2020, we hit publish on a WordPress blog we’d cobbled together. It looked like this.

“We used to have a blog, and then they took it away from us,” we wrote. “After months of slowly going insane and then a couple of weeks where we went more insane faster, we mustered up the energy and $150 to start something new. This is it. We hope you enjoy.”

Now it is March 23, 2024, and we are still, somehow, here. It’s our fourth birthday. How the hell did that happen? It remains something of a mystery to us, a great cosmic wonder, that we’ve managed to stick it out this long.

To mark our big day, we’ve all written a little bit about what creating this place, and keeping it going for this many years, has meant to us.

AND THANK YOU. Thank you thank you thank you. We still hope you enjoy. OK, here’s our little blurbs, plus some of the many, many forms of Discourse Bird art Sam has done over the years.

---

Aleks

It's staggering how dire the state of journalism has become in the four years (!!!) since we started Discourse Blog. BuzzFeed effectively no longer exists; Pitchfork will become a part of GQ; Gawker died for a third time; Vice has been lobotomized. Everywhere we learned to be journalists are either gone or have become hollowed-out versions of themselves, sock puppets that have Vanity Fair branding but only publish videos where actors ask each other what's in their bags.

We came out of the gate more ambitious than I think we realized, given that this site was started on a whim with little intellectual rigor beyond, "Lol, what if?" We have gone through...a lot in the last four years as a site. You might have noticed that we've gotten smaller and less ambitious. That's by design—frankly, it’s the main reason we're still here and able to publish five(ish) days a week. We are a sustainable business, though not an especially lucrative one; this is no one's full-time job (if you want to change that, email me).

Would I have loved it if things had turned out differently? Absolutely. But if it's the choice between swinging big and failing or scaling back and surviving as a smaller version of our dream, I would have picked the latter all over again. This site has been one of the more meaningful adventures of my life—and a humbling one. I am grateful I still get to talk with the smartest, funniest people I know whose perspective I value and crave every day. And I am grateful to our readers, new and old, who find what we think is important or funny to be interesting enough to read or even pay a little money for. Let's keep doing it forever? Anyway, Stephen Breyer's Ice Cream, please don't be annoying in the comments on this.

Caitlin

When we decided to write these blurbs for our fourth (!!) anniversary, a clear and contained narrative immediately entered my brain: Discourse Blog has been a challenging, affirming, and rewarding experience during the last four—often quite trying!—years, and I am extremely grateful for it. That’s all 100% true! But then I started to ruminate more deeply on what brought me to this project and group of people in the first place.

I started at Gizmodo Media Group as a social editor just a few months after Gawker folded and the company was acquired by Univision. It was a very weird time! I worked across the blogs in various ways during my time at GMG, but ended up settling full-time at Splinter—a somewhat random circumstance that has ultimately become a significant thread in my working life.

On the one hand, we were in the depths of the internet content mines. On the other hand, I was truly in awe of everyone (at Splinter and throughout GMG). It was chaotic, but I felt unbelievably lucky. I feel the exact same way now.

I’m continually floored by the seven other people who built Discourse Blog (Paul Blest is One of Us forever). I’m deeply heartened by their talent, commitment, and righteous indignation. It keeps me sane and makes me want to work harder, be smarter, and continue to fight like hell. I’m thankful for them, and for everyone who has been here with us, reading, commenting, screaming into the void, and striving for something better. It’s a steady light in a persistently grim world. It’s a reason to keep showing up, fuel to help us move ahead, and a way to connect when the isolation of the modern world threatens to take hold. I’m full of gratitude. I remain awestruck. Onward we go!

Cros

Discourse Blog has been a funny thing for me. It was nice, in the depths of the pandemic, to have a little thing to log on and do. I was freelancing then, and work was inconsistent at best and the world outside was, well, you know. But over the years it's grown into one of the steadiest parts of both my professional and personal lives—something I know is going to be there, that I can both fall back on and rely on when I have a take that just won't fit anywhere else. We've ironed out the kinks along the way —made the publishing schedule lenient enough that people can work other full-time jobs or for me, freelance relatively successfully without feeling like the blog is a massive obligation—which has in turn given us the freedom to both blog about what we want and try new things, like all the podcasts we keep launching.

It's made me incredibly grateful both to my friends here and to all of you, reading this blog, that we have the support to create this kind of space—a fully independent media company and a platform where we can speak, and write, directly for people we know actually want to read our thoughts and arguments. When I write for other publications, I often spend a lot of time shaping my voice or the structure and tone of a story to fit their standards. In many cases, I don't mind this, but on some days, there's nothing that hits like catching the wave of a good blog and just going for it, with no reservations or fear that what comes out at the end of a manic session on the keyboard won't be what a persnickety editor or sensitive audience wants to read. I have no idea what I'm going to write about next week or the week after that. But it's an incredible feeling to know that whatever it is, you all will be there to read it.

Jack

One of the things that hurt the most when Splinter got shut down was that Splinter had felt like it belonged to us. We created it, drove ourselves into the ground to keep it going, tended to it, got sued for doing it the way we knew we should, and devoted way more hours than were healthy to it. And though we were obviously doing all that for work, we were also doing it because we cared about it, and because it was our thing.

But, in the span of one relatively short meeting, our bosses demonstrated to us how much Splinter was not our thing. It was their thing. And they were done with it, and done with us, and that was that.

Discourse Blog is different. It is our thing. Nobody can take it away from us. We are doing it for ourselves, each other, and our readers. I can’t really describe the wonder of that kind of freedom—what it feels like to build something rooted in friendship and camaraderie and political values and fun, rather than in balance sheets and corporate soullessness, and then to have it actually last. It is a beautiful thing.

I am immeasurably proud of the work we’ve done. But I am even prouder of the way we’ve done it—of the bond we’ve maintained with each other through some extremely difficult growing pains, of the dedication we’ve shown to each other and to our work, of the community we’ve created with all of you. And I hope that, whoever you are, and whatever you do, you get to have something like Discourse Blog at some point in your life.

Katherine:

It’s hard to believe we’ve been making Discourse Blog for four whole years already (not going to make an election joke, although I do hope DB’s reign is more befitting a monarch than a one-term president). It feels like just yesterday I was getting laid off (the first time)!!!

Now, years into this project—which started in a group message where I was champing at the bit to get back to writing blogs—I still feel endlessly lucky that I get to shoot the shit with some of the smartest, most culturally savvy people I know, people who get where I’m coming from and (largely) hate the same things and bad people that I hate. I also work with one of the most accommodating editors in the entire world—a distinction I do not bestow lightly—who lets me write what I want and is gracious with all of the various moods that unemployment has thrown my way.

In return for my posting and (occasional) podding, Discourse has given me so much. It’s provided me a sense of purpose in one of the politically darkest times I’ve lived through and the mild solace of knowing there are still media organizations willing to say what’s morally crystal clear, consequences be damned. It’s kept me writing and thinking when my brain would otherwise turn to mush. It’s also given me the financial breathing room I need to avoid rushing into another job I’ll come to hate — and that’s all thanks to you, our dedicated, mostly loving readers. I’m so happy I get to do this.

Rafi

Strange as it may be to say, getting laid off from Splinter more than four years ago was one of the best things to happen to me and my career. If not for sincerely impressive shit-headedness on the part of the Adults in the Room at G/O Media, Discourse would never have come to be, and I would never have been able to do something I love with people I’m still impressed I get to call “friends.” I’ve never thought of Discourse as “work,” really. Instead, it’s where I get to have fun and be rude and say things I think are important about whatever I’d like. Any pleasure our readers get from reading Discourse is a happy byproduct of the pleasure we all get from writing it. Even if every single one of our subscribers decided someday to take their business elsewhere (please don’t!!) we’d probably still be here doing exactly what we’ve been doing—because we like doing it, and frankly, we don’t really know how to do anything else.

Sam

“What I learned in boating school is…” This is what comes to mind when I search my brain for sentences that objectively describe Discourse Blog’s impact on my life. It’s not for a lack of thought, but because I am overwhelmed with feeling. 

For me, Discourse Blog started as a light at the end of a twisting tunnel. Four years ago, I was so young in my journalism career, and so deeply jaded about what any legacy news organization could do to stymie the failure of our industry. I doubted what value I could ever find in such an organization, and what value they could ever find in little ol’ radicalized me. Today, I still feel that way (surprise!), but my cynicism has simmered, cooled by this growing independent writer-led and reader-supported movement that surrounds us. Often, I’m still in disbelief that I’m somehow a member of one of these publications, because I cannot believe how utterly lucky we’ve gotten—even through all the pain of learning how to run a business and work together as a living organism. I am so lucky to have found this partnership, to have amazing partners who know how to give and take and meet each other halfway, and for this to have been the phoenix born of a screeching hellfire. 

And though I’d enjoy waxing on, I won’t go too in-depth on how I feel Discourse Blog has stretched me beyond my self-perception. I love what we get to do here, and though our blog might not be the full-time vision we had put forth when we first began, it is so far beyond everything I once dreamed of as a high school newspaper editor. I love writing about the serious and the mundane, and getting to take the time I need to discern and communicate what I’m feeling. I love getting to make whatever artistic bird-themed Frankenstein design that my brain feels like molding together. I love learning how to make us sound and look better—I love learning how I can make us better. To my partners and to our readers, thank you for everything, and I am so excited for what we do next.