The Awl

» see theawl.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the awl was the kind of thing new york media-twitter read between meetings. i was not in that demographic. by 2009 i was a computer engineer in turkey reading hacker news and turkish forums, and "small literary blog from sicha and balk's apartment" was something i would have found out about years later from a tweet about a tweet about a closing announcement.

choire sicha and alex balk launched the awl on april 20 2009 after they were laid off from radar magazine, with david cho on the business side. the motto was "be less stupid" and the bet was that you could fund a quiet site full of good writing on display ads and reader-loyalty alone. for about eight years the bet held up.

around the awl proper there grew a small network of sister sites. the hairpin was the women-focused outlet while the billfold ran the personal-finance beat. splitsider handled comedy, and the sweethome started as one of those sister sites before splitting off into what eventually became wirecutter. that one got bought by the new york times for thirty million dollars. the awl itself never got that kind of exit.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the awl was a counter-bet against the gawker-network model of the same era. where gawker was sharpening every post into a traffic event, the awl deliberately ran essays that did not optimize for shareability. it had no front-page algorithm. its homepage was a chronological list of posts with editor-picked headlines, and that was the entire user interface for nine years.

writers came up through it. choire sicha had already done his time at gawker before founding it. alex balk wrote in a voice that was funny in a specifically nyc way. the awl was where you went to read people who would not have written the same thing anywhere else.

~ the funny part ~

the awl's actual business problem was very 2010s. display advertising on small editorial sites collapsed first into a long slow decline and then into nothing as facebook and google took the digital ad market between them. you could still write well in 2017, but you could not pay rent doing it on independent ad revenue. the awl tried subscriptions and a podcast network and a few other ideas. nothing worked at scale.

in the middle of january 2018 the editors announced the site would stop publishing at the end of the month. the final post went up on january 31. the hairpin had already shut down in 2018 a few weeks earlier under a different ownership story. the network was gone in under a month.

~ what replaced it ~

the awl is now the standard reference for a specific shape of internet death. a small site beloved by a small audience and kept alive by a few people who eventually run out of runway. cohost would later run the same pattern at a different scale, and so did so many newsletter-and-substack projects after the awl closed.

the people are still around. choire sicha went to the new york times. several awl writers became newsletter writers. the sweethome lineage is the wirecutter you read today inside the times paywall. the literal site is gone, but if you read modern internet writing the awl's voice is everywhere under the surface.

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