Mother Jones illustration
Welcome to a fun Mother Jones experiment straight out of the early aughts! We’re bringing blogs back.
The coroner’s report on blogging goes something like this: After disrupting everything and changing the world forever, blogs were professionalized and incorporated into publishing outlets, and the things that defined them—voice, analysis, obsessiveness—became standard for writing on the internet. Blogs won, and died. The epistolary back-and-forth of blogging moved largely to social media, and by the time Mother Jones removed most of our blogs from our site in 2016, they really were basically just a vestigial button in our CMS.
But tellingly, we actually didn’t get rid of all of them. Kevin Drum’s blog remained because his readers—our most loyal—had a relationship with him that dated back to his time before joining our magazine. And that meant something and it means something still. The world has changed a lot since 2016, both the publishing world and the world at large. The way we interact with our readers, the way we interact with each other, the way we want to cover the news, has all evolved.
Impeachapalooza, a new blog by the staff of Mother Jones about the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, was created in the spirit of those blogs of old. It will be a place where the various developments of the day are conveyed, discussed, analyzed, raged at, and laughed about by reporters and editors. There will be half-baked thoughts and over-baked thoughts and silly thoughts. There will be dumb thoughts and smart thoughts and tall thoughts and short thoughts and thoughts in the rain and thoughts on a train, and then at the end of everything, right at the last, if I wish upon a wish and hope beyond hope it will help us answer such questions as “What the hell just happened?” and “What did Giuliani just say?” and “Wait, which one’s Yovanovitch again?”
And who knows! Maybe the real impeachment is the friends we’ll make along the way.
