Marc Weisblott introduced me to Moxie, the blonde Los Angeles blogger I went looking for today. That sent me down a second rabbit hole. Whatever happened to Marc?
Moxie vanished. Weisblott did the opposite. He has spent more than thirty years doing variations on the same peculiar job while the media around him collapsed, reinvented itself and collapsed again.
The Marc I knew through Weisblog was built for the Internet before the Internet had worked out what to do with a man like him. He carried an encyclopedic memory for media personalities, discarded pop culture, local characters, dead careers and the small details a conventional reporter throws away. He cared about the famous person and also about the person who had been briefly famous fifteen years earlier and now sold insurance.
That sensibility predates the blog. By December 1994 he was writing for Toronto’s alternative weekly Eye Weekly. One surviving piece, preserved in the old Google Groups archive, is an absurd statistical breakdown of the Beatles’ Live at the BBC. He counted how many times various words appeared and catalogued the Little Richard yelps of Paul McCartney (b. 1942). The next year he covered Lollapalooza for Eye, and his dispatch from the festival has the method already formed. The big event is a skeleton. What holds him are the booths, the minor personalities, the overheard absurdities and the cultural debris piling up around the stage.
Three decades later you can still hear that voice. The institutional home changed. The collecting instinct did not.
During the first blogging boom he ran Weisblog and a second site called Better Living Centre. He belonged to the early generation who understood, well before the newspapers did, that the Internet rewarded personality, velocity, linking, obsessive specialization and the ability to notice things an editor would refuse to assign.
An artifact from 2005 survives. Eye Weekly ran a piece about Toronto’s emerging professional blogs, and Weisblott, then running Better Living Centre, warned of a “dire, pressing, imminent need” for legacy media to change. Twenty years later the old article resurfaced on LinkedIn. Eye Weekly had by then ceased to exist. Weisblott had not.
He kept moving between the old media and the new. He returned to Eye Weekly and was still publishing there in 2008, writing about magazines, Toronto politics, popular culture and whatever else crossed his desk. He also worked the portal era at Canada.com and Yahoo Canada, where in 2011 he carried the title National Affairs Reporter. The stories under that grand billing ranged from newspaper paywalls to MuchMusic changing its logo to the return of comfortable chairs to Indigo bookstores.
That range is the argument. For Weisblott the trivial story and the serious story sit on one continuum. A television logo, a dying mall, a radio host switching stations, a newspaper putting up a paywall: each opens onto institutions, money, generations and memory. He treats the small item as evidence.
The mature version of Weisblog arrived in 2015. St. Joseph Communications gave him a small budget and a wide leash and he built a weekday email newsletter called 12:36. Every weekday at 12:36 in the afternoon, subscribers got his compact digest of Toronto news, Canadian media gossip, personalities, oddities and anything he thought deserved saving.
In a 2015 interview with J-Source he called it a piñata. A major appointment at a broadcaster might land beside a forgotten local celebrity, a strange real-estate story and something overheard on television at one in the morning.
The newsletter also answered a question about what had gone wrong online. Rather than build stories engineered to produce another click, he put the useful part in the email. In another J-Source interview he described the inspiration as escaping the dying era of clickbait journalism and holding a direct relationship with readers instead of renting one from a platform. This was 2015, several years before Substack made the newsletter fashionable. He had shown up early again.
The delivery time was half gimmick and half theory. He judged 12:36 to fall in the lull after the morning burst and before the evening cycle, and in October 2015 the Nieman Journalism Lab examined the experiment.
The numbers got respectable for a product this idiosyncratic. By August 2016 the list held just under 5,500 subscribers with an average open rate of 52 percent. The staff tested subject lines and found they barely moved the needle. People opened it because they wanted Weisblott. David Topping of St. Joseph told J-Source the product was built around him. By December 2016 Nieman Lab reported roughly 7,000 subscribers and open rates between 55 and 60 percent. By the fifth anniversary in 2020, Billboard Canada reported about 10,000.
Small by Internet arithmetic. A loyal audience assembled around the judgment of one man, which is the harder thing to build.
He found another medium suited to him around the same time. He became a recurring guest on Toronto Mike’s podcast, where the man famous for compressing an enormous amount of information into a tiny newsletter proved he could also talk about Canadian media for three hours without pausing. A July 2020 appearance ran three hours and one minute. A June 2022 appearance ran three hours and seven. Mike Boon kept asking him back because Weisblott had become a living index of Toronto media.
Then 12:36 met one of the discontinuities he had spent his career chronicling in other people’s businesses. In August 2022, St. Joseph stopped publishing it. This time he got custody of the name and the mailing list. On an October 2022 Toronto Mike appearance he explained that his 88-month relationship with the company had ended and that he was working out how to carry on alone. He moved 12:36 to Substack and started experimenting. He was back with Toronto Mike in September 2023, talking about the Canadian media landscape.
Meanwhile he had taken a conventional editorial job at one of Canada’s oldest Jewish publications. The Canadian Jewish News shut down during the pandemic and relaunched in 2021 as a digital-first operation with Weisblott as managing editor. The choice fit. He had watched publications die for decades because they confused the survival of an institution with the survival of its format. In an August 2021 interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency he called the shutdown a bit of a gift, because it freed the paper from its weekly print habits.
“That liberated the next iteration from the customary publishing style,” he said.
His career consists of escaping customary publishing styles. The alt-weekly became the blog. The blog sensibility moved into the portal. The portal writer became a newsletter editor. The newsletter personality became a podcaster. Then the veteran of every one of those transitions helped rebuild a Jewish newspaper as a website and a podcast network.
The 2024 CJN masthead still listed Weisblott as managing editor. The role then shifted. The fall 2024 and spring 2025 magazines carried him as contributing editor, while the podcast credits identified him as editorial director, including an episode released May 2, 2025.
When that old Eye Weekly piece about Toronto blogs turned up on LinkedIn in 2025, Weisblott appeared in the comments and wrote that the same sentiment had carried through to a job he had recently been terminated from. He added: “we’ll keep trying …”
Marc has spent his adult life inside industries that keep announcing their own extinction. The alternative weekly died. The personal blog died. The newspaper portal died. Yahoo’s journalism ambitions shrank to nothing. Local outlets shed staff by the hundred. Twitter stopped being the thing journalists thought it was. The independent newsletter turned fashionable and then overcrowded. Podcasts multiplied past the point where any human could hear them.
Through all of it he kept doing what he did at Eye Weekly in 1994. He noticed things. He remembered people. He followed careers after everyone else quit paying attention. He tied the trivial event to the machinery that produced it.
That is what makes him the right companion piece to Moxie. She took one exit from the early blogosphere. The persona had done its work, she walked away, and the Internet forgot her at its usual speed. Weisblott took the other. He never left. He moved his pile of clippings to the next platform and kept going.
There is a symmetry in my going looking for Moxie and ending up looking for Marc. Twenty-four years ago he was one of the people wiring those little blogging worlds together. He traveled, he met bloggers, he introduced strangers to each other, and he treated obscure personal websites as though the people behind them might amount to something. Sometimes they did.
And Marc Weisblott, connoisseur of whatever happened to everybody else, turns out to have a decent answer to the same question about himself.
He kept going.
