Still Another Childlit Blog Gone

Jen Robinson's Book Page, one of the more notable childlit blogs from the early 2000s, disappeared from the Internet on Tuesday, September 30. Typepad, the blog's host, has shut down and any blogs it supported are gone, too. 

When announcing this on Facebook a few days ago, Jen said she hadn't been posting regularly over the last few years, which is the case with many literary blogs, particularly those dealing with children's literature. Ms. Yingling has been blogging independently since 2006. Betsy Bird's A Fuse #8 Production began the same year, but has been part of School Library Journal for a long time now. There are a few others still out there, but many children's litblogs just disappeared with little fanfare. 

When Julie Danielson ended 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast in 2022, I addressed the incredible amount of time serious blogging takes. Jen Robinson was a serious blogger. In Julie Powell and the World of Blogging, I suggested other reasons litblogging, in general, is a shadow of its former self.

Jen's Facebook announcement of the disappearance of her blog brought 90 comments discussing the early days of children's litblogging. (In those early days of children's litblogging, we talked a lot among ourselves. All of that would have been in blog comments.) Substack came up, which is usually described as a newsletter site. I posted about Medium.

"Medium is often described as a blogging platform, I think because of the ease of use and because people are encouraged to post a lot there. But a lot of publications are created there, and the material published in those seems more like articles than blog posts, possibly because there is usually a gatekeeper. Plus, the platform is just so overwhelmed with tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of writers, many setting themselves up as authorities in all kinds of things. There definitely is not the feeling of the early blog era--the salon-type feeling, the exploration."

A Greek philosopher (Heraclitis--I just looked it up) said something about not being able to enter the same river twice, because the water in the river has passed on, you're entering new water. Meaning life, like rivers, never stays the same. I'm glad I was there for childlit blogging's wild west period, but I also recognize when it's time to move on. 

I will pause in my moving on, though, to direct you to this pdf we created of a blog tour stop I made at Jen Robinson's Book Page in 2008 in support of what may end up being my last children's book, A Girl, a Boy, and Three Robbers. Why, yes, that does make this all about me, doesn't it? What did you expect? This is an author's blog that exists to support my work, making it different from Jen Robinson's Book Page, a children's literature blog that existed to support that genre and its readers.

If you take a look at that blog post, you'll see that she didn't set that thing up as a traditional author interview with brief questions that I would go on and on about. This was a conversation, and Jen's contribution was at least as important as mine. Her side of the discussion shows her breadth of knowledge of the genre we were talking about. It also suggests that she assumed her readers would either know what she was talking about or want to know it.

I think Jen Robinson's Book Page represented the high end thought and writing that went into the best of children's book blogging back when children's book blogging was new.