This month’s late(r) edition of The Session is hosted by Jay Brooks, who has been helping to organize the monthly blogging project since the beginning, and he is asking us to consider The Future of Beer Blogging. And also, that this is apparently the second-to-last Session:

My topic is fairly broad and open-ended, but centered on what has happened to beer blogging over the almost eleven years since we started the monthly Session. Back in those dark ages of the mid-2000s, beer blogging was relatively new, and many people were jumping in, no doubt in part because of how easy and inexpensive it was to create a platform to say whatever you wanted to say. It was the Wild West, and very vibrant and engaging. You could write short or long, with or without pictures, and basically say whatever you wanted. People engaged in commenting, and whole threads of conversation ensued. It was great.

Fast forward a decade and there are many more ways that people interact online, and blogs, I think, lost their vaunted place in the discussion. Now there’s also Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and countless other ways to communicate online. This has meant blogging, I believe, has lost its place at the top, or in the middle, or wherever it was. That’s how it feels to me, at least.

So where do you think the future of beer blogging is heading? What will it look like next year, or in ten years? Will it even still be around? If not, what will replace it? People won’t stop talking about beer, analyzing it and tasting it. But how we do all of those things certainly will. That’s what I’m interested in with this topic. What do you think the future will hold? What will we all be doing, beerwise?

As for this second-to-last Session?

Participation in The Session has been waning for quite some time now, and finding willing hosts has become harder and harder. I’ve had to cajole and beg for hosts many times, and I’m not sure why I’ve kept it up other than we’ve been doing it so long that I just kept going out of habit. But the reality is that if people don’t want to host and fewer and fewer people are actually participating I’d say that’s a pretty strong signal that the time has come to shut down the Session. So in consultation with Stan, we’ve decided that December 2018 will be the last Session. It’s been over ten years and by the time the smoke clears we’ll have done 142 Sessions, which is a pretty good run.

It’s a bit bittersweet, but I can’t argue the point; it’s been a long road and a great stretch, but it has been waning for awhile now. But who knows, perhaps I’ll continue to write de facto Session posts each first Friday(ish) of the month…

As to this month’s topic, The Future of Beer Blogging. I’ll start right off by unabashedly saying, I’m a blogger, and a beer blogger first and foremost; I’ve been blogging and proto-blogging since before I started The Brew Site and the web has been a natural medium for this writing. I’ll always be a (beer) blogger, even though I also introduce myself as a “beer writer” these days (made easier by the fact that I also write professionally these past few years).

Jay’s not wrong about the early years of blogging but I’m no so sure about the “place” of blogs in the online ecosystem; that implies that a “blog” (or web log, for the etymology buffs) was a discrete, standalone entity that was supplanted by other online entities such as the various social media platforms. In reality the blog was—is—just another form of social media and those early years simply mark its progress on the evolutionary scale of online interaction. Blogging today is simply another online social outlet (it always was, actually), but it’s lost any sexiness or cachet because it’s “old.” Even though the DNA of blogging is embedded in almost every other social media platform that is popular today.

Blogs aren’t going anywhere: 25% of all websites—that is, the entire world wide web—are powered by WordPress, a blogging platform. So I think where we get hung up on isn’t the blog itself—keep in mind, it’s simply a tool designed to facilitate writing and publishing online, allowing for discussion and generally displaying content in reverse chronological order (surprise surprise, just like Facebook)—but perhaps the terms “blog” and “blogging.” There is baggage that comes with those terms, hearkening back to those early “Wild West” days that Jay mentions, and possibly rightly so.

So “blog” by any other name, and as it relates to beer blogging, let’s turn this on its ear a bit, shall we?

• Do you use Untappd to review beers instead of a beer blog? Check in and rate your beers, with pictures, and engage in “toasts” and comments with others on the beers you are drinking? Congratulations, you’re a beer blogger participating in a group beer blog cataloging beer consumption.
• Do you follow your favorite breweries on Facebook to keep up to date with their latest beers, events, and news? Ask questions and interact with the breweries in the comments of posts? Yep, you guessed it, you’ve subscribed to their blogs.
  • (Frustratingly even more so when the brewery doesn’t even have its own website, and instead relies on Facebook for its online presence.)
• Do you read beer news from Brewbound, or pointed, insightful commentary from author Jeff Alworth, or long-form magazine-style stories from Good Beer Hunting? Well guess what…

Hopefully you get my point.

I don’t think beer blogging is going anywhere, though it’s going to look… if not different, then varied. I suspect there will the mix of “traditional” blogs (like this one) where writing is the focus—be they long-form or snippets, reviews, news, or opinion—along with ones that look like Tumlbr or Pinterest or who knows, maybe even livestreams via YouTube or Instagram stories.

Here’s the thing. Beer blogging in the “traditional” sense is really a medium for beer writing. Consider the beer blogs that have been around a long time (like Jeff Alworth’s I linked to above, or Stan Hieronymus, or Alan McLeod, and so on—they are all very, very good. And I’ve just violated the habits of good writing by using “very”). Composing articles and essays, or maybe press release-style marketing, or beer reviews, it’s all about writing, and not everyone has the patience or inclination to express themselves in that way. That’s okay. They will express themselves in one of the many other forms (short for “platforms”?) and that will be just as valid.

Beer blogging continues on.