In the very first issue of Mediapolis, Erica Stein and I wrote an editorial summarizing our vision for the project. A key sentence: “Following in the tradition of open-access scholarship and middle-state publishing, we conceive of Mediapolis occupying a space between a personal blog and a peer-reviewed research journal.” The “middle-state,” described by Steve Wilcox at the time as “digital publications that have the timeliness of blogs but the critical attention to detail of a journal,” was an important conceptual model for us. In the early goings, we attempted to chart a course between two forms of writing – the blog and the academic journal – that we saw as distinct from what we hoped this project could evolve into. In some sense, then, it was easier to conceive of this project at its outset as a kind of negative space. We weren’t trying to launch a new journal for peer-reviewed academic research articles; the niche we saw ourselves filling was in convening a conversation among academics and practitioners who were broadly interested in questions to do with media and the city. But we also sought to publish work that was more sustained than the “commonplace book” approach to writing for the web that Lisa Spangenberg had described as characteristic of the personal academic blog.
In 2014, Patrick Dunleavy had drawn a crucial distinction that informed that approach. He observed that while the solo blog was imperiled by changes to the ways people were reading on the web – most notably, the rise of social media – multi-author blogs represented an important new frontier in the way that academic research was communicated. We were looking at multi-author blogs as models when we were brainstorming what Mediapolis could look like – within our field, publications like In Media Res and Flow, and in other areas, publications like Places, The Monkey Cage (now Good Authority), or LSE Impact – the same site where Dunleavy’s essay on the structure of academic blogging had been published. In its earliest days, we imagined a large roster of occasional contributors alongside one-off essays by authors from adjacent fields whose perspective could inform conversations happening on the site. One of the appeals of the multi-author format was that there was strength in numbers. Instead of every author having to publish her own work on her own blog and hope that her readers found a way to it, our ambition for Mediapolis was to create a venue for an audience of like-minded readers, with a broad base of contributors who amplified one another’s readership.
But the vision we laid out in that initial editorial – published on December 5, 2015 – was already imperiled by changes afoot in the broader landscape of web and academic publishing. Putting a finger on a precise moment when this shift happened is difficult, but in hindsight several factors were important. Even before our first issue published, Google’s decision to shutter its Reader platform in 2013 marked a significant blow to RSS and, in turn, the basic infrastructure of disseminating information on the web. Katie Baker would later look back on this decision and label it The Day the Good Internet Died. While RSS survives to the present day – Mediapolis’s RSS feed is still prominently linked at the top of our website! – the demise of Reader hastened the end of the era of the personal blog, a decline that was already underway before the first issue of Mediapolis was published.
Likewise, of course, our collective relationship with social media was very much in flux at the time that the journal launched, and it’s instructive to look back at the way we engaged on social media in those early years. Academic Twitter circa 2015 was still primarily about promotion, rather than creation. I can still recall the sense of satisfaction we had on the day the site went live as we tallied our first followers and re-tweets; looking back on those earliest tweets now, it’s clear that we understood social media as a promotional tool, another way to drive readers to Joshua Glick’s article on Coney Island:
Today in @mediapolisjrl: Josh Glick reflects on his work organizing “The Moving Image of Coney Island” #coneyvisions https://t.co/FRbr2DSIfS
— Mediapolis Journal (@mediapolisjrl) December 10, 2015
This was the heyday of “alt metrics,” and I can remember how exciting it was to see as the work we were publishing was being picked up and recirculated around the web. To my memory, this tweet about an article Johan Andersson wrote for us was the first time one of our articles got picked up by Catherine Grant’s influential Film Studies for Free blog:
Interesting, important and timely work by Johan Andersson at @mediapolisjrl. https://t.co/CDLaYxjhqc
— Catherine Grant (@filmstudiesff) February 26, 2017
Tellingly, within a year or so after that tweet, FSFF had mostly wound up active publication to its website; it continued on as a Twitter feed for years after.
Issue by issue, it became clear that changes were afoot. Externally, the publishing environment around us continued to shift. The more casual, connective conversations that we hoped to incubate at Mediapolis were shifting more and more to social media during the journal’s initial growth years. Podcasts and newsletters sprouted up in the niches where blogs had once been. The emergence of newsletter platforms like Substack and Ghost illustrates that an audience for long-form written content remains, even if the older model of following blogs has largely been replaced by the inbox. They paved the paradise of the open web, and rather than putting up a parking lot, they built walled gardens; today, tracking where which conversations are happening can sometimes feel like it requires a flowchart and index cards. Digital chit-chat migrated to Facebook groups and Twitter and Reddit, and then to Discord servers and Slack instances, and later still Bluesky and Mastodon, each one waning and waxing in influence and utility over time.1It’s enough to make a Gen Xer long for the glory days of Usenet. Ten years on, the context within which Mediapolis exists has changed dramatically. The conquest of social media, the proliferation of individually-authored newsletters, and the novel uses of other platforms, all contribute to the sense that whatever the “middle” of “middle-state publishing” was ten years ago, it no longer holds. The “middle state” between a blog post and a research article was calculable: in word count, it was about as long as this essay. But “the middle” itself is today much larger, and stretched out in multiple directions. Consequently, Mediapolis today is home to video essays, to podcast episodes, to book reviews and, of course, to social media:
What happens when cities become datasets for AI competitions? Sam Hind shows how machine learning’s scoreboards distance practitioners from the real-world impacts of their work.
— Mediapolis Journal (@mediapolis.bsky.social) November 20, 2025 at 10:11 AM
As Mediapolis looks out into its second decade, one of the key questions concerns how it will adapt its position within a dynamically-changing field. As we welcome a new leadership team taking over the editorial helm, I look forward to see the direction they steer the journal in over these next few years.
Elsewhere, scholarly communication moved off the open web altogether, as platforms like Discord, Slack, or Facebook became ways where digital chit-chat happened.
Notes
| ↑1 | It’s enough to make a Gen Xer long for the glory days of Usenet. |
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Brendan Kredell is Professor of Film at Oakland University, USA. His research examines the relationship between cities and media, with particular focus on audiences and patterns of media consumption, cultural data and urban development, and film festivals. He is the co‑editor of two books: Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (2016), with Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist, and The Routledge Companion to Media and the City (2022), with Erica Stein and Germaine Halegoua. He was a founding co‑editor of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, and his research has been supported by a number of grants, including a Fulbright fellowship.
