In a provocative piece at The New Republic, Marc Tracy traces the rise and decline of the blog, a form that has essentially conquered the distribution of information online, but whose ubiquity has made individual personalities less important:

When he started a blog, it was on his own—other than a small handful of strange, Web-only creatures, in 2001, what magazine wanted a blog? By 2005, the answer to that question had changed, allowing Sullivan to ensconce his blog in larger institutions—Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, in chronological order. This was the golden age of the personal blog: The Internet had empowered a few strong writers to create their own brand (if you were idiosyncratic—say, if you were gay, English, Catholic, and heretically conservative—then all the better) and a few strong big brands to create their own small brands (Media Decoder was launched in 2009, and finds its roots in TV Decoder, a blog that was started when the Times poached writer Brian Stelter, who like Sullivan, Klein, et. al had built a following on the Internet as a personal brand). Meanwhile, readers interested in reading the best that had been thought and said on the Internet had no choice except to follow along—the best they could do was to use RSS to focus on the feeds they tended to find interesting.

But today, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn’t need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn’t going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog.

What Tracy really means, he clarifies, is that “What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter.” Obviously, it’s true that the first-mover advantage for blogging is gone, and that fewer people are coming on line as individual bloggers. When I started working at ThinkProgress two years ago, it was already evident that this was a way that fewer and fewer people were getting full-time writing jobs. And what was even clearer was that publications like The Atlantic and the Daily Beast that were hiring lots of individual bloggers were doing so as a way to populate channels. The key technology now is less the publishing platforms that let people write short posts and publish them in a continuous stream, and more the ability to cross-post, so a piece can live both on an author’s individual page, or in the feed on a relavent subject or for a relevant section.

Or as Michael S. Rosenwald, who wrote a blog for the Washington Post called Rosenwald, Md., put it: “We’ve been rethinking blogs here at the Post. Many of us bloggers are moving over to personality pages. In one place, you’ll be able to find all my stories for various sections of the paper (Page One, Metro, Outlook, Sunday Business) as well blog posts about life in Maryland and the rest of the region. Click here for the link to my personality page, which you can bookmark for easy access.”

And I think this is a situation that signals less the decline of blogs than their evolution. Readers can continue to follow the feeds of individual writers they prefer, or whole sections that they find interesting, depending on whether they’re interested in a particular perspective or a larger news feed. If blogging started out as a way to accomodate the way writers wanted to publish their work, it’s now come to serve a different end in giving readers flexibility in how they curate what they want to read, and publications the ability to accomodate them. That’s not death, precisely. It’s more like metamorphosis.

In The New Republic, Marin Cogan dismantles a central assumption of Netflix’s House of Cards, the idea that all female reporters in Washington are constantly sleeping with sources for stories. The show got Washington Herald-turned-Slugline reporter Zoe Barnes’ arc wrong, she argues, not because no reporter ever succumbs to the personal charms of a staffer or member of Congress, but because the show reverses the dynamic. Instead of throwing on v-neck t-shirts and push-up bras and heading over to Congressmen’s townhouses, the more common dynamic is powerful men in Washington putting the moves on women they assume are interested in them. Marin reports:

As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.”…“I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who have no game and think, because you’re listening to them intently and probing what they think and feel, that you’re romantically interested, rather than conducting an interview,” says Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic. “Every female reporter I know has had this issue at one time or another.”

Marin’s piece clarified for me the reasons I reacted so viscerally to the element of the show that portrayed Zoe as the initiator of her affair with Frank, and her colleague Janice’s revelation that, despite slut-shaming Zoe, she too was sleeping her way up the ladder. The arc wasn’t just a male fantasy—it was a fantasy that erases an ugly reality by inverting it. It’s not Frank’s fault for stepping out on his marriage, or putting Zoe in a position where she feels like she has to put up with his advances to get a story. An ugly scene between them in which Zoe asks Frank “If you just want the girl who will do your bidding, you have that. Why do you have to fuck me?…Why do you need this? You don’t seem to get any pleasure out of it. I certainly don’t,” is, in the framework of the show, at least partially her due for being naive enough to think that what was going on was something other than, as Frank puts this, “a transaction between two consenting adults.”

What Marin is talking about is a very specific form of sexual entitlement. But this week also saw the debut of Said To Lady Journos, a compilation of the way female reporters have been harassed on the job. “If you got shrapnel in your ass, I’d be happy to take it out,” a contractor says to a reporter in Iraq. “Why don’t we make it a camera, and turn it on you?” a city councilman tells a reporter who is asking permission to tape record their interview. And these are the things that people are saying to female journalists in person.

In combination, it makes the thought of recommending journalism as a career to young women kind of exhausting. Be ambitious? Pop culture will tell people that you’re an amoral blogslut. Get sexually harassed on the job? You were probably Zoe Barnes-ing it up. This is not to say that no woman with a reporter’s notebook and a hard pass has ever behaved poorly, or that journalistic sauciness doesn’t make for compelling drama. But when it comes to sexism fatigue, the Evil Girl Reporter has me particularly tuckered out.

I think about the way journalism is portrayed in pop culture quite a bit, and yesterday for Slate, on the occasion of the swan song of Gossip Girl, I spent some time writing about how television and movies fail to deal with a phenomenon the media itself has adjusted to: bloggers. In particular, I was interested in a bit of a gender split that seems to be occurring. Female bloggers are shallow, or gossipy, or in need of tutelage by older reporters (male and female), who are presented as a distinct species. But men may have it worse: they’re crazed conspiracy theorists:

If State of Play’s portrayal of Della was irritatingly smug, the way USA’s miniseries Political Animals treated its young female blogger was downright insulting. The miniseries countered old-school journalist Susan Berg (Carla Gugino) with blogger rival Georgia Gibbons (Meghann Fahy)—not just a shallow, style-obsessed chronicler of D.C. nonsense, but a selfish slut who was sleeping with Susan’s boyfriend. To the show’s credit, Georgia at least got a shot at proving she was competent, scooping Susan on a story when Susan’s old-school focus on source development lead her to delay the news too long. But even if Georgia got the story, she was still a bad girl, if personally rather than professionally, and Susan was the hero, even if she got so cozy with her sources that she ended up sleeping with the First Lady’s son. In this formulation, reporters get a free pass on crossing ethical lines, but their blogger counterparts are dumb little girls who need to be taught valuable lessons.

Male bloggers don’t fare much better though: While their female counterparts are merely unsubstantive, men who blog for a living are loons, and sometimes ones who do enormous damage. In Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, a disgruntled blogger who keeps getting his freelance pitches turned down by a newspaper editor. When a global pandemic strikes, Alan sees his chance to become a prophet: He spreads the rumor that he’s cured himself of the disease using forsythia as an herbal remedy, and urges his readers to ignore public-health officials. His misinformation renders the population more vulnerable—including that newspaper editor, whom he leaves to die in the street—and he’s ultimately found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company eager to profit off the crisis. When, at the end of the film, Alan’s arrested, he claims he’ll be bailed out: He’s evil, but the stupidity of his followers may be even more dangerous.

Either way, it’s interesting that movies and television haven’t accommodated themselves to the idea that bloggers and journalists can actually be the same thing. Maybe now that Hollywood went gaga for Nate Silver, we’ll get hero bloggers, or at least bloggers with integrity, in a couple of development cycles. I’m guessing Jim Sturgess ends up playing Silver.

Meghan Daum’s essay in the Believer on internet commenting is, I think, a fairly even-handed example of the species. She acknowledges that our discourse has always had its share of venemousness, that she isn’t actually required to read these comments. But I think she’s a bit too quick to dismiss comment moderation and community building:

But there is a world of difference between the traditional notion of public participation in a newspaper or magazine and the cacophonous, sometimes libelous free-for-all that passes for it today. Whereas the old-fashioned letter to the editor involved crafting a letter, figuring out where to send it, springing for a stamp, and knowing that its publication-worthiness would be determined by an actual editor who might even call and suggest some actual edits, today’s readers are invited to “join the conversation” as if the work of professional reporters and columnists carries no more authority than small-talk at a cocktail party. And although some sites are making efforts to weed out the trolls by disabling anonymous posting, filtering comments through Facebook, or letting readers essentially monitor themselves by flagging or promoting comments at their own discretion, most are so desperate to catch eyeballs wherever and however possible that they’re loathe to turn down any form of free content.

Obviously it’s not easy to moderate comments and to foster a community where a health conversation can actually happen. It’s something that takes a lot of your writers’ time if, like me or Ta-Nehisi, you read and moderate comments yourself. And if you don’t want to do that, you have to hire a community manager or managers. But I certainly think there are examples out there of successful efforts. And I think it’s probably worth interrogating the idea that moderation kills traffic or commenting communities: I think it’s much more likely that people don’t moderate because they don’t make the effort. I’m unpersuaded that the people who occasionally show up here to decry liberals or inform me about the evils of Muslims are carrying more traffic with them than they drive away. It’s a much more fruitful pursuit to figure out how we can create civilized spaces than to lament some sort of collective loss of civility. I think we should be open to a whole gradient of walled gardens, from moderated comments sections, to places like Metafilter where you have to pay to join the conversation as a demonstration of seriousness.

The most interesting question Daum raises, I think, is whether commenting and the internet have changed the way we write. She says she never would have published an essay she wrote in the mid-nineties about sex and HIV if she had to publish it in the environment writers face today. But Emily Gould did write a long essay about her own self-absorption in the New York Times Magazine when she knew she’d likely get dismantled in the comments section. And if web publishing existed in the same form then that it does now, Daum might not have had to cut down her essay to the point of unrecognizability to get it published by a respectable outlet. The way she describes it makes it sound like a perfect fit for The Awl. But even if you lose some ability to be personally revelatory, the huge benefit of blogging in particular is the ability to try out ideas, to play with different parts of arguments, and to test-drive different pieces of evidence, and to refine your ideas into a final product. We might be able to be less personally vulnerable on the internet, but I think it’s probably worth it in exchange for being able to do intellectual growth in public and with the benefit of feedback and allies.

My original choice for Valentine Wiggin would have been Chloe Moretz: thanks to Hit-Girl and Let The Right One In, we know she can play awfully tough when necessary while still retaining her girlishness. Plus, she and Asa Butterfield’s developed a really nice dynamic in Hugo.

But failing that, I’m delighted to hear that Abigail Breslin will be playing the part. Since her debut in Little Miss Sunshine, she’s been doing a series of roles that are solid but have none of the oddity, vulnerability, and conviction of that breakout part. Now, she has one.

I’m sure I’m not the only lady blogger, or lady nerd blogger, to feel like Valentine Wiggin is part of the reason we do what we do. I had no desire to manipulate the players in the Cold War when I was as young as she is. But the idea of finding a place where you can have a running conversation with anyone you want? Starting off playing pretend and finding your own voice–and then learning other people find it powerful? That’s a compelling pitch, particularly when you take away the potential-serial-killer-turned-world-leader older brother and the younger brother the state wants you to manipulate into committing xenocide.

The character descriptions for Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi classic Ender’s Game are out, and while some of them sound a little emotionally simplistic, they also sound generally true to the book, which is promising.

And they also made me realize that all I want for Christmas* is for Abigail Breslin or Chloe Moretz to play Valentine Wiggin. One of the things that’s been most exciting for me about the past couple of years is realizing what a wonderful, strong group of young actresses we have coming up in the wings. Breslin has grown from an odd little girl in Little Miss Sunshine to a warm, funny young person in movies like Definitely, Maybe and No Reservations. Chloe Moretz is rawer — despite the fact that she’s a year younger than Breslin, she’s taken on slightly older-themed roles like Hit Girl in Kick-Ass and the vampire in Let Me In. And Saoirse Ronan’s proved that she can do both the action thing with Hanna and a more delicate kind of girlhood in The Lovely Bones, which I think was flawed but very interesting and sometimes moving. And they’ve all coming up playing well-developed and defined characters, while also avoiding kiddie romance stuff. All of them, but particularly the first two who I think are a bit more age appropriate, would be wonderful at playing a fiercely concentrated and multi-dimensional young blogger, Tavi with a genius for research and geopolitics rather than fashion and girl culture.

On the other hand, I have no real idea about who should play Ender. Maybe it’s just that the girls have gotten more attention or, in what would be a shocking turn of events, there have been a spate of better roles for women than for men. But it seems like there’s a bit of a gender gap for talent in the mid-teen years. And as much as I love me some Valentine (and would love a stand-alone movie about a light-speed traveling activist historian), a great Ender will be key to making this movie work. A great Peter, too.

*We’ll talk my birthday separately.