Since the term web log was first used in 1997blog was a contractionits use as a way to publish updated information and journal entries in reverse chronological order had evolved. Blogs were first the territory of the proverbial nerds in pajamas writing up their observations about technology and the Internet and linking to websites they considered intriguing. Soon others joined in, establishing subject niches. Blogs were seen as democratic. Publishing became easy, instantaneous and close to free.

The advent in July 1999 of free blog hosting sites, which required no software coding knowledge and featured the simplicity of a word processing program, meant anyone could start a blog. It was only a matter of time before journalists adopted the medium. Some, with no traditional media organization behind them, created blogs that reported news, blurring the definition of journalist. Some established journalists used blogs to post items that didnt fit within their published stories. A few bloggers became so popular that they were like independent newspaper publishers, with readerships that a small-town newspaper would envy.

In 2008, Talking Points Memo , a political website, received the prestigious George Polk Award for its investigative reporting on the firing of eight US attorneys general. TPM founder Joshua Micah Marshall told the New York Times : We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead there are an ongoing series of dispatches. ^[3] That was the first time a Polk award had been given to a news organization that existed solely on the web.

Despite such accolades and growing popularity, journalists wrestled with the question of whether blogging should be considered a legitimate form of journalism and whether its practitioners should be encouraged to adhere to traditional media ethics. Were bloggers journalists, or simply aggregators? Most bloggers linked to interesting content online, added a snarky comment and posted it rather than do original reporting. Should they second-source facts, and protect sources as traditional journalists tried to do? Non-journalists, such as government agencies, struggled with the definition as well: were bloggers entitled to press passes to public events?

As in mainstream media, the pressure was on to be first with a scoop and attract a large audience. In the blogosphere, success was measured by page views, which in turn translated into advertising revenue. Detractors of blogging sites claimed that the emphasis on site traffic, rather than substance, resulted in a preponderance of salacious items, sometimes with insufficient sourcing. To generate more hits, bloggers wrote headlines containing keywords that were known to increase a posts chances of coming up first in web searches. This practice, known as search engine optimization or SEO, made a site more visible. So, for example, sex sold. As Gawker founder Denton would later write:

We measure. We hone headlines. We sell stories. Sometimes we oversell. Butand this marks us outwe believe that the best web content optimization strategy is something as old as journalism itself: the shocking truth and authentic opinion. Well spill the truths that others gloss over to protect their access to sources or to conform to political correctness. ^[4]

At Deadspin , Daulerio and his staff sought to create a hybridblog-style short posts with commentary and links, combined with more traditional deeply reported stories, some as long as 11,000 words. I like the mix of highbrow and puerile [expletive deleted], he says.

Hear more: A.J. Daulerio talks about Deadspin's coverage