Cathy Seipp (1957-2007) died in March 2007, just as the media world she had anticipated was becoming normal. She had spent the previous decade moving between magazines, newspapers, online columns and her own blog while gathering around her a Los Angeles network of writers, lawyers, academics and broadcasters. Mickey Kaus (b. 1951), Matt Welch (b. 1968), Ken Layne (b. 1964), Stephen Bainbridge (b. 1958), Amy Alkon (b. 1964), Sandra Tsing Loh (b. 1962) and Hugh Hewitt (1956-2024) moved through the circle. Nancy Rommelmann (b. 1959) and others belonged to the wider social ecology. They disagreed about politics. They shared a professional temperament. Independence mattered. Candor mattered. Wit mattered. Suspicion of official accounts mattered. The writer who could build a name without waiting for an institution to confer one had standing.
That makes the Seipp circle useful for understanding what digital media do to professional writers. The members belonged to an existing culture of journalism and argument before blogs, Twitter, Substack and podcasts became dominant. They then entered those environments at different speeds and under different professional constraints.
The variation gives us something close to a natural experiment. We can ask what happens when people with overlapping formation encounter different technological incentives. Some became relentless bloggers. Some moved toward Twitter and short-form commentary. Some built subscription podcasts. Some retained strong institutional homes. One abandoned political blogging for a printed desert magazine. Another divided his personal and professional selves between platforms. Some preserved the disciplines of their original profession. Others allowed personality and publication to fuse.
I was in the middle of this crowd from 2002-2007. After she died, I lost touch with everyone.
I miss them.
Cathy had no successor.
During her final five years, I didn’t see blogging and the internet damaging Cathy’s friends. It only seemed like a great thing. The online world appeared to offer unlimited possibilities for the energetic writer, however financially precarious our present. We felt like the future.
Looking back at this golden age of blogging, I’m reminded of the 1985 movie Plenty. Roger Ebert wrote:
At the end of World War II, a young woman stands on a hilltop in France and, as the sun bathes her in golden light, she says, “There will be days and days and days like this.” That image provides the last shot in “Plenty,” which is the story of how very wrong she was. The woman is Susan Traherne, a young English fighter in the French Resistance. She is not very seasoned and perhaps not very good at her job, but she stays alive behind enemy lines and she has a brief, poignant love affair with one of the men who parachuted down out of the night sky to fight the Germans.
The movie opens with her days in France. It follows her through the next 15 or 20 years, and ends with that painful flashback to a day when she thought the future held nothing but good things for her. But nothing else in her life is ever as important, as ennobling or as much fun as the war. She is, perhaps, a little mad. She confesses at one point that she has a problem: “Sometimes I like to lose control.”
Elias Aboujaoude (b. 1971) published Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality in 2011. His framework helps organize the differences. The Seipp diaspora also exposes the limits of the theory. The Internet reshaped these writers by selecting among personalities they already possessed.
(I found the book in April 2018 and was immediately struck by its truth. I repeatedly cited it over the next eight years. There was a Luke prior to finding this book and a more chastened one afterward.)
Aboujaoude notes that online environments elicit a different self. Ordinary inhibitions weaken. Distance from the other person removes some of the social signals that constrain speech. Status hierarchies become less visible. Publication becomes easier. Reactions become faster. Against this background, Aboujaoude identifies several recurring tendencies. The online self tends to become grandiose, self-centered, aggressive, juvenile and impulsive.
The virtual self can also be bolder and more effective. Reduced inhibition can free a shy person, make an unpopular opinion easier to express and allow connections that ordinary social settings might prevent. That positive side is essential for understanding writers. Blogging solved problems for writers whose institutions had become slow, risk-averse or inhospitable to certain work.
Aboujaoude’s stronger proposition concerns spillover. Behaviors repeatedly enacted online can migrate elsewhere. A person accustomed to being unusually daring or undiplomatic online can become more daring or undiplomatic generally. Professional writers give us a way to test that proposition. Their work leaves archives. We can observe the writer before the blog, on the blog, on Twitter, in a podcast and sometimes back inside a formal article. The evidence shows public registers switching on and off.
The first complication is that Seipp’s group already possessed many traits that Virtually You associates with online behavior. The circle admired independence from editors and institutions. Its members liked irreverence, strong opinions and sharp language. Seipp understood that blogging rewarded frequent posting, links, reaction to the news and interaction with readers. Near the end of her life, she admitted to her own “junior-highschoolish” snark and suggested that a degree of immaturity might help a blogger in this 2006 column. She also described blogging as the comparatively fun and low-stress part of writing, an outlet into which ideas about politics, media, family and friends could flow quickly, in this NPR essay.
That matters. If Mickey Kaus mocks a politician on X, we cannot classify the behavior as Internet-induced disinhibition. Kaus was a contrarian long before Twitter. If Amy Alkon insults somebody on a blog, we need to know whether the pre-social-media Alkon already wrote that way. She did. Her 2004 blog archive could be spectacularly caustic.
The same problem appears with Nikki Finke (1953-2022), who was the talk of the Seipp ecology. A 2004 Los Angeles profile described a combative journalist whose friends already worried about her self-destructive tendencies. Finke distinguished between approaching the line and disregarding it. Her aggression, obsessive sourcing and refusal to accommodate Hollywood sensibilities all predated Deadline Hollywood Daily. She was never sued for libel and she was right that anyone who published she was crazy operated with reckless disregard for the truth.
The Internet encountered a population already rich in potentially digital traits. The question is what happened to their existing dispositions when platforms began rewarding some of them.
Everybody in this crowd was self-aware, disciplined and successful prior to blogging. Nobody dominated conversations. Everybody was a keen listener. Nobody appeared to have legal problems nor drug and alcohol problems. Everybody had the traits of the winner. They earned their living in that rare way — with their words.
You’d love this crowd to be your neighbor because they were great fun while living up to their responsibilities. There were no psychopaths here. No kleptos. No rapists. No liars. No brawlers. No felons. You trusted them around your kids because they modulated their personalities to the situation.
Kausfiles began in 1999. Kaus, the second smartest person in Cathy’s world after Eugene Volokh, the second best performer after Sing Loh, and the funniest and most fearful member of the group, later recalled that his first post was a conventional article with a lead, developed paragraphs and a conclusion. Then fellow early blogger Walter Olson teased him about allowing material to sit unchanged while everybody else was producing fresh content to attract traffic. Kaus understood the lesson. He began producing fresh linked commentary on the day’s news. In his own retrospective telling, the platform taught him how to blog. His ten-year Kausfiles retrospective was a behavioral adaptation to an attention environment.
The underlying Kaus did not suddenly appear in 1999. The skepticism, policy obsession, argumentative curiosity and willingness to depart from mainstream liberal positions were already present. What changed was the basic unit through which those qualities reached readers. Book became article. Article became blog item. Blog item became linked reaction. Linked reaction became tweet.
The change can now be seen inside Kausfiles, because most of the site functions as a repository for material first produced in the rapid social-media register. The platform Kaus helped pioneer has been colonized by the platform that succeeded it. Every time I surf to Kausfiles, I regret it because there’s no longer any value there.
His immigration writing gives us a control because the underlying position has remained stable. Kaus has argued for decades that high levels of lower-skilled immigration can hurt less-skilled American workers and weaken a politics built around working-class interests. What varies is the register. In longer work, qualifications, alternative explanations and chains of inference remain visible. In rapid social-media commentary, those intermediate stages compress. The proposition arrives closer to its argumentative endpoint.
The Internet did reduced the size of the container in which Mickey Kaus thought in public. That is close to what Aboujaoude feared when he argued that compressed forms strip complicated questions of the weight and elaboration available in slower writing. Even here the deterioration story is incomplete. Kaus still links. He still asks questions. He changes his mind on particulars. The epistemic personality has survived better than the literary form.
Finke’s pre-blog LA Weekly prose was ferocious. A 2004 column about a Hollywood law-firm dispute opens with combat, betrayal and “backstabbing weasels.”
What changed in 2006 was the publication interval. Finke launched what became Deadline Hollywood because the Internet could do something her weekly column could not. She could report developments as they happened instead of waiting for the next publication cycle. The Los Angeles Times described the creation and later sale of the site here.
That technological change transformed the competitive environment around Hollywood journalism. Speed became part of Finke’s product. Being first became visible. Updates could be continuous. A scoop could produce traffic immediately. A rival could be beaten publicly rather than in the next edition. Finke became inseparable from the operation. For a period, reporter, columnist, editor, publisher, tip line and personality occupied the same body.
The platform did not create Finke’s grandiosity, aggression and impulsivity. It made some traits more profitable. The old system sometimes punished Nikki Finke for being Nikki Finke. The new one monetized it.
The e-personality arises through incentives. If a platform pays attention, status and money every time one portion of the personality appears, that portion will appear more often. The writer learns what works. Eventually the audience learns to expect it. Then the professional identity and the rewarded persona begin to fuse. Finke is a good example.
Matt Welch complicates the theory because his move into podcasting increases personality while sometimes restoring intellectual restraint. He moved through newspapers and magazines, Reason, cable television, Twitter and eventually the long conversational world of The Fifth Column without ever self-destructing.
Welch, the libertarian, had the best radar for how to thrive in institutions such as the Los Angeles Times and Reason magazine while sounding heterodox and a little dangerous in a completely safe way for his employers.
The podcast is less formal than an edited Reason article. There is more profanity, autobiography, mockery, gossip and inside humor. The hosts are part of what subscribers are buying. Welch has made the audience relationship explicit. In this May 2026 subscriber note, he wrote that he reads every email and comment from subscribers and described how listener complaints had altered audio production, video, merchandise and guest selection. One repeated complaint was that the show needed more guests, especially people with whom the hosts disagreed. The program responded by increasing them.
The paying audience asked for more friction.
Welch’s edited Reason examination of Donald Trump’s interpretation of William McKinley’s tariffs works through historical evidence and includes McKinley’s own later movement toward reciprocity. The podcast register is more personal and socially disinhibited. A long podcast can place Welch opposite a cohost or specialist who can interrupt, disagree or demand elaboration.
Twitter removes the other person’s face. A conversational podcast puts another mind back in the room. This distinction may be more important than the distinction between print and digital. Long conversation can increase social disinhibition while decreasing epistemic disinhibition. The speaker jokes more and qualifies more. He swears more and explains more. The resulting person sounds less professionally restrained while reasoning under greater immediate resistance. Aboujaoude’s category of “online” is too broad to capture that.
Amy Alkon provides the same lesson. The Advice Goddess persona existed before mature social media and was strong from the start. Her early blogging intensified its directness because the blog could become a running diary of fools, rude people, media encounters and cultural irritants.
Alkon, the loudest, brashest and most extroverted of the set while simultaneously a great listener and a good friend, also used digital media to build a different intellectual environment. Her advice writing incorporated behavioral science. A 2021 column on reactions after sex invokes research by evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and David Buss (b. 1953) before applying it to a reader’s predicament. Her HumanLab put scientists and researchers into the conversation. One episode with animal behaviorist Jennifer Verdolin was structured around the scientific study of flirting and relationships.
That produces multiple public Alkons. There is the Advice Goddess confronting some social offense. There is the syndicated columnist applying scientific literature. There is the host talking with somebody who possesses independent expertise. The identity of the interlocutor can matter more than whether the medium is digital. A generalist conversation allows broad speculation. A specialist conversation imposes boundaries. The e-personality is not singular.
When ProfessorBainbridge.com began in 2003, the blog mixed corporate law with Catholicism, legal education, wine and food. Over time, most of the digressions moved to Twitter while the blog became increasingly concentrated on corporate law and governance. Bainbridge describes the resulting site as more professional, more scholarly and less personal. His own retrospective is here.
Bainbridge sorted his personae. Twitter received one register. The professional blog received another.
The current Substack displays more personality than a law review. A 2026 post on a Delaware corporate-law decision was headlined “The Court Got It Right, and So Did I”. That is personal-brand behavior. Beneath the self-congratulation sits conventional legal analysis. He names the case, reconstructs the constitutional objection, identifies the court’s holding and directs readers to his earlier work and related scholarship. The persona has intensified.
This is why counting boastful headlines, profanity or first-person references would produce a bad study of online intellectual deterioration. Personality and epistemic quality can move independently.
Eugene Volokh (b. 1968) was the smartest person in the Seipp orbit and the most ambitious after Andrew Breitbart. He published The Volokh Conspiracy. Most of Volokh’s online work retains the professional habits of a law professor. Cases are named. Opinions are quoted. Doctrinal distinctions remain visible. Counterexamples matter.
The most instructive example concerns the relationship between blogging and scholarship. In 2021 Volokh posted a draft argument about potentially defamatory omissions in reports about legal proceedings. He invited reader feedback and asked for help finding a clearer title. Comments persuaded him to change it. The resulting article, “Libel by Omission of Exculpatory Legal Decisions“, appeared in the Notre Dame Law Review.
The causal sequence is the reverse of the pessimistic Internet story. A scholarly idea enters a blog. Readers criticize it. The author revises it. The revised argument enters a law review. The digital medium becomes part of the quality-control system.
The same professional continuity appears in Volokh’s podcasting. A 2026 episode on student threats and campus speech was organized around two cases pointing in opposite directions. A later episode on defamation used contemporary lawsuits as the entry point into a structured explanation of American defamation doctrine. The speech is less polished than a law-review article. The lawyering remains.
Volokh had professional ballast. A writer who has internalized a discipline may no longer require an editor to supply all of the restraint. The profession has installed some brakes. A legal claim encounters cases. A scientific claim encounters studies. A reported claim encounters sources. A pure political take may encounter nothing except another take.
Sandra Tsing Loh, the best performer in the set, created The Loh Down on Science which consists of ninety second episodes. If compression produced the intellectual deterioration Aboujaoude feared, the program should be maximally vulnerable.
Its production system points in the opposite direction. UC Irvine partnered with Loh to produce short, humorous explanations of scientific research and train graduate students in science communication, as described in this university account. Graduate researchers find studies and write scripts. Editors and other participants review the work. During the pandemic, the program described a distributed process in which young scientists researched, wrote, edited and recorded the material through digital tools, documented here.
A ninety-second radio piece can contain more professional friction than a 4,000-word independent newsletter. Short is not impulsive. Digital is not unedited. Informal is not epistemically weak. The production system matters more than the word count.
Ken Layne, the biggest introvert in the set, gives us the rarest case. He left. Layne had been involved in early Internet journalism and later in the vicious political-blogging environment of Wonkette. By 2015 he was describing the online news economy as a competition for ever more extreme headlines attached to the same small pieces of information. He said one reason Desert Oracle contained little news was that people could use less of it. The Los Angeles Times profiled the project here.
Five years later he had come to regard the Internet as a bad environment for writers because readers often glanced at material to decide whether they agreed with it.
His response was environmental. He built Desert Oracle around a printed object, physical landscape, radio, narrative, folklore and the slower rhythms of the desert. Digital distribution remains, but it orbits something anchored outside the rapid national reaction cycle.
Layne reverses the direction assumed in Virtually You. The medium acts on the person. Then the person notices. Then the person acts on the medium by leaving it. This capacity for platform choice needs to be added to any mature theory of digital personality. People are not merely shaped by environments. Some eventually learn which environments produce versions of themselves they do not like.
Several figures around the Seipp ecology prevent us from exaggerating the novelty of the digital transformation.
Jill Stewart shows that alternative-weekly journalism had already developed many supposedly Internet-native traits. It rewarded naming enemies, strong first-person judgment, provocation and visible conflict.
Hugh Hewitt supplies the broadcast version of the same control. Talk radio already rewarded rapid reaction, host-centered authority, audience intimacy and coalition signaling before Twitter arrived.
Heather Mac Donald (b. 1956) supplies another kind of control. Her rhetorical certainty and strong thesis-first prose long predate podcasts and social media. Her continuing relationship with the Manhattan Institute and City Journal also provides an institutional floor beneath the personality economy. The think tank gives her a professional home while City Journal supplies regular publication and editorial discipline.
Nancy Rommelmann occupies a middle position. Subscription media have made the writer more central to the product, but field reporting remains an important part of her work. Personality has expanded without replacing reportage.
These cases warn against reading every contemporary stylistic trait backward into the technology. Some writers were already combative. Some were already personal. Some worked in institutions that already rewarded speed and audience intimacy. The proper measure is change from the writer’s own baseline.
Across the cohort, the clearest digital changes concern four things.
The first is publication latency. Finke is the purest example. Something that once waited for a weekly column could appear immediately. Kaus learned that fresh content generated attention. The distance between thought and publication narrowed.
The second is the visibility of feedback. A magazine writer may hear eventually that an article succeeded. A blogger sees links and comments. A social-media writer sees likes and reposts. A subscription host sees renewals and cancellations.
The third is the growing importance of the personality itself. Readers once bought an issue containing a writer. Increasingly they subscribe to the writer. That is a major institutional shift. The author becomes part of the distribution system.
The fourth is the fragmentation of professional identity into platform-specific registers. Kaus on X is not Kaus in a long argument. Alkon in a blog fight is not Alkon interviewing a scientist. Bainbridge on X is deliberately not Professor Bainbridge on his professional site. Welch in Reason is not Welch drinking and arguing with his friends on The Fifth Column. The same person contains multiple communicative selves. Different platforms bid for them.
The evidence is weak for the proposition that digital media made these professional writers less capable of dealing with evidence. Kaus became more compressed, but links and empirical argument remain. Finke’s public persona became enormous, but sourcing remained the foundation of her power. Welch became more informal and audience-entangled, but long conversation sometimes increases exposure to criticism. Alkon built a science-interview operation. Bainbridge became more professionally specialized. Volokh used blogging as part of a scholarly revision process. Loh built strong research and editing behind a compressed product. Layne responded to what he saw as degradation by changing environments.
Professional writers differ from the ordinary Internet users who dominate much of Aboujaoude’s discussion. They enter digital life with a preexisting occupational identity. The reporter has rules. The lawyer has rules. The professor has rules. The science communicator has rules. Those rules compete with the rules of the platform. Sometimes the platform wins. Sometimes the profession wins. Usually some hybrid emerges.
The Seipp cases suggest a more precise theory of digital reshaping than Virtually You provides.
The first variable is publication friction. How much time, editing and resistance stand between thought and publication?
The second is feedback intensity. How quickly does the writer discover which behavior attracts attention?
The third is persona dependence. Does the audience primarily want information, or continuing access to a personality?
The fourth is professional ballast. What external disciplines remain strong enough to constrain the performance?
The fifth is platform agency. Has the writer learned to compartmentalize, modify or abandon environments that reward undesirable behavior?
These variables explain the cohort better than ideology does. Kaus and Finke experienced enormous changes in tempo because their media removed friction. Welch became more personality-driven as subscribers moved closer to the production process, but the conversational format restored interpersonal resistance. Bainbridge partitioned the registers. Volokh preserved unusually strong professional ballast. Loh surrounded extreme compression with an institutional production process. Layne exercised platform agency by leaving political blogging. Mac Donald retained institutional ballast. Hewitt and Stewart show that many digital incentives had analog ancestors.
Aboujaoude was right to notice that online environments can call forth a recognizably different person. He was also right that these differences need not result from conscious deception. People can begin behaving differently in environments that feel different.
The Seipp diaspora suggests that the most useful unit is not a single “e-personality.” It is a repertoire. A professional writer already contains aggression, caution, humor, vanity, curiosity, generosity, certainty, doubt, competitiveness and discipline in different proportions. Platforms change the relative prices.
Twitter makes compression cheap and patience expensive. A personal newsletter makes intimacy valuable. A subscription podcast makes recurring personality valuable. An edited magazine makes factual embarrassment more expensive. A law review makes unsupported doctrinal claims extremely expensive. An expert interview makes pretending to know something more difficult.
Repeated exposure to one reward system makes one portion of the repertoire more practiced. That portion can eventually appear natural. It may become what the audience believes the writer really is. The technology has not created a personality. It has selected one.
This returns us to Seipp. Her importance to the story lies partly in that she assembled, before mature social media existed, a human network that already rewarded many of the characteristics the coming media system would prize.
Her dinners created relationships. Information moved laterally. Reputation moved through people. Wit produced status. Candor produced status. The introduction between two useful strangers created value. The network rewarded the individual writer.
Then software arrived and reproduced much of the architecture at enormous scale.
Nikki Finke shows what happens when a preexisting temperament finds nearly perfect technological reinforcement. Mickey Kaus shows what happens when the unit of public thought gets steadily smaller while the underlying intellectual preoccupations remain recognizable. Matt Welch shows that personality media can simultaneously increase social informality and restore intellectual resistance. Amy Alkon shows that the identity of the interlocutor can matter more than whether the communication is online. Stephen Bainbridge shows that a writer can divide his public selves by platform. Eugene Volokh shows that professional discipline can survive the removal of traditional gatekeepers. Sandra Tsing Loh shows that brevity need not mean impulsivity. Ken Layne shows that the writer can eventually reject the environment doing the shaping. Jill Stewart and Hugh Hewitt show that many supposedly digital tendencies have pre-digital ancestors. Heather Mac Donald shows what institutional ballast looks like over decades.
Cathy’s friend David Rensin resisted the pull of the blog. He was in the middle of her world, attended her funeral, and she identified him as one of the good writers contributing to Kevin Roderick’s Native Intelligence project at LA Observed. Her praise contained a criticism. She thought Rensin and several of the other Native Intelligence writers were producing material fundamentally unsuited to blogging. Their pieces were too long, insufficiently reactive and better suited to leisurely reading on paper.
Rensin more or less agreed. In a 2007 post he wrote that before joining Native Intelligence he had never had a blog because he did not have enough opinions and did not want to share his personal life. Then he proceeded to write a long comic essay about dyeing his hair. In a 2007 interview he described himself as someone who interviews people and transforms what he learns from them into books. The self is an instrument for eliciting somebody else’s story rather than the subject of the story.
When Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) died, Rensin did not manufacture an instant opinion. He reopened an interview he had conducted with Hopper in 1989 and let the archival encounter do the work. See Rensin on Hopper. The pattern is the interviewer’s method transferred into a blogging environment. Blogging gave Rensin permission for more first-person comedy and domestic disclosure. It did not turn him into a reactive pundit. The platform offered him a faster self. He declined it.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a man more secure than David Rensin. He never seemed needy and he never boasted.
Nick Gillespie (b. 1963) is hard to classify because the distinction between his professional identity and his digital identity was weak from the beginning. He was already participating in Internet culture through Suck in the 1990s, writing under the pseudonym Mr. Mxyzptlk. A 1997 piece later republished by Reason is profane, exaggerated, funny, culturally omnivorous and gleefully anti-reverential. The later Internet did not have to teach Gillespie how to write in an irreverent digital register. He arrived with one.
His connection with Seipp ran through the overlapping Reason and Los Angeles journalism worlds. Seipp contributed to Reason, helped organize a Los Angeles Press Club event around Gillespie’s Choice: The Best of Reason, socialized with the magazine’s people and wrote admiringly about Gillespie’s patience during a long interview.
The subsequent career was media expansion without epistemic deterioration. Gillespie moved from editing the print magazine to editing Reason.com and Reason TV and eventually to hosting The Reason Interview. He conducts long interviews with authors, researchers, activists and political figures while remaining an editor at large.
The visible personality is strong. Leather jackets, pop-culture references, jokes and the cultivated outlaw persona are part of the product. Unlike Finke, Gillespie never became separable from an institution in the same way. Reason supplies editorial continuity, ideological boundaries broad enough to permit internal argument and a steady supply of colleagues willing to disagree with one another. Where Welch moved into personality media and later recovered friction through podcast interlocutors, Gillespie’s personality was incorporated into an institution early enough that institution and persona evolved together. The e-personality works for him because his professional institution learned how to house it.
How he pulled this off while consuming enormous qualities of alcohol that would have sunk a normal man, I’ll never know.
One day in 2006, Nick said to me, what are you going to do now? You seem to have peaked years ago.
I said yeah, and I thought, I have no idea. I’m lost.
Kevin Roderick is good comparison with Nikki Finke. Both were established Los Angeles journalists who discovered that the Web allowed them to publish independently. Both built sites based on professional knowledge and source networks. Both became indispensable to people working inside the industries they covered. Then they built almost opposite kinds of blogs.
Roderick spent roughly two decades at the Los Angeles Times. He launched LA Observed in 2003 after someone showed him blogging software and he recognized that Los Angeles lacked the sort of media site he thought the city needed. He had already spent time in the WELL online community.
LA Observed accumulated roughly ten thousand entries, most of them Roderick’s. Its stated formula was “independent reporting, informed commentary and selective linkage” about Los Angeles media, politics and culture. That description sounds like blogging. The temperament of the site often did not. Seipp made the point in 2006. She acknowledged that virtually every Los Angeles media person checked LA Observed because its media information was valuable. She also complained that Roderick was not friendly toward the kind of irreverence directed at his former newspaper that she valued, and noted that he had eliminated comments.
Roderick adopted the technology while resisting part of its culture. He used the blog to abolish one newsroom and then rebuilt many newsroom norms inside the site. Attribution mattered. Local knowledge mattered. Curation mattered. Professional reputation mattered. He became an editor and publisher as well as a blogger.
Like Rensin, Roderick radiated no need. He knew who he was and he didn’t pretend to be anyone different. He was quiet, courteous and generous.
Finke removed latency and made speed, combat and personality increasingly central to the product. Roderick removed the institutional employer and preserved much of the institutional temperament. Both demonstrate independence. Only one became Nikki Finke. The loss of an employer does not cause the loss of professional restraint. A journalist can carry the newsroom inside himself and recreate it around a URL. Finke found a temperament the platform could amplify. Roderick domesticated the platform.
Luke Y. Thompson complicates the study because his career does not contain a clean “professional first, Internet second” break. He began 1999 by hand-photocopying movie and pop-culture opinions in zines and ended the year as a critic and assistant arts editor at New Times Los Angeles. He subsequently wrote for the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, E! Online, Forbes and other outlets, edited Topless Robot, worked at Nerdist, developed a toy-blogging specialty and became a substantial part of Deadline’s Comic-Con coverage. See Thompson’s career biography. He was also part of Seipp’s Los Angeles world and attended her funeral.
Thompson is almost the opposite of Rensin. Rensin entered blogging with habits that resisted it. Thompson’s habits were compatible with it from the start. The relevant change is expansion of what could count as professional expertise. The old movie critic reviewed films. Thompson could review films, cover a Comic-Con panel in real time, photograph toys, report collector news, review fast food, write about wrestling and move continuously between professional criticism and fandom.
Two features of his subject matter kept the expansion honest. Toy claims are checkable against the object. Film judgments announce themselves as criticism. Comic-Con reporting requires being in the room. His informal voice reads as expertise because the domains reward the kind of knowledge fans can verify. The Internet permits the critic to display more fandom, humor, private taste and niche obsession than an old newspaper arts page would have tolerated. Those are the traits that create trust inside fan communities. The medium changed what kind of professional writer he could become.
Luke didn’t hate many people. He really hated Andrew Breitbart. For Breitbart, however, Thompson didn’t register.
Breitbart (1969-2012) was in Cathy’s world. He hosted me, Cathy and her daughter Maia for a Memorial Day weekend in Palm Springs in 2004 where we watched him operate the Drudge Report. He attended Seipp’s funeral with his wife. He differed from almost everyone else discussed here because he did not merely adapt to new media. He developed a theory of political action around it.
He was the most ambitious member of Cathy’s world.
He discovered the Drudge Report in 1995, contacted Matt Drudge (b. 1966), and eventually worked with him. He later helped Arianna Huffington (b. 1950) develop the Huffington Post before building his own network of “Big” sites. Nick Gillespie’s assessment after Breitbart’s death captured the essential achievement: whatever one thought of his politics or methods, Breitbart had demonstrated that people excluded from or dissatisfied with existing media could build their own outlets.
The distinction from Finke is intentionality. Finke discovered that the Web increased the value of traits she already possessed. Breitbart understood the media architecture as the political battlefield. In his 2011 interviews around Righteous Indignation, he described himself as fighting a political-media complex and explained his method as forcing stories into wider circulation until traditional outlets had to react. He also encouraged ordinary people armed with digital cameras to produce stories that established institutions were ignoring.
This is Aboujaoude’s positive e-personality pushed toward its political conclusion. The Internet gives the individual confidence against institutions, removes hierarchy, broadens agency and permits direct public action. Aboujaoude allows that the online self can become bold and effective enough to voice opinions that ordinary constraints might suppress. Breitbart built a career out of the capacity.
He also demonstrates the associated danger. When media is understood as combat, attention from an adversary becomes evidence of effectiveness. Provocation is an operational technique. Personal attack, spectacle, confrontation and the speed of circulation become strategically valuable. Volokh’s professional discipline resists platform pressure. Breitbart developed a professional discipline out of platform pressure. Conflict was the craft. He is the institutionalization of disinhibition into a theory of media. Finke made the personality a newsroom. Breitbart made the personality a movement.
Ray Richmond is a middle case. He was in Seipp’s friend and colleague. Seipp moderated a 2005 American Cinema Foundation discussion at which Richmond and Matt Welch were panelists. He had spent many years inside conventional entertainment journalism before starting Past Deadline in 2006 as a blog connected to The Hollywood Reporter. The blog quickly became another channel for entertainment news and opinion, with stories sometimes traveling from Richmond’s site into wider national circulation.
When Richmond wrote in 2007 about the late Merv Griffin’s (1925-2007) concealed sexuality, the column created a dispute over its handling by The Hollywood Reporter and Reuters. Richmond then used Past Deadline to explain the sequence of events and defend his position. That is a distinctly digital development. The old columnist depended on the publication for both the original argument and any subsequent clarification. The blogger possessed a parallel voice. The institution could publish, edit, remove or retitle a piece. The writer could immediately tell readers what he believed had happened.
The independence produces a secondary effect. The author becomes part of the story. Editorial disagreement becomes publishable content. Richmond nevertheless remained more attached to conventional professional roles than Finke. He was a critic and entertainment reporter operating through a blog rather than a personality who happened to report. Blogging increased immediacy, authorial ownership and the capacity to fight an editorial dispute in public. It did not swallow the underlying occupation.
Anita Busch is the strongest argument in the enlarged cohort against confusing conflict with digital disinhibition. She belongs as an adjacent Hollywood-journalism control.
Her professional life was highly combative before blogs mattered. In 2001, while editor of The Hollywood Reporter, she resigned after a dispute with management over the paper’s handling of an investigation into one of its columnists. Contemporary Los Angeles Times coverage described her resignation as a refusal to stand behind management’s decision. See The Los Angeles Times on Busch’s resignation. The following year, while investigating Steven Seagal (b. 1952) and alleged organized-crime connections, Busch found a damaged windshield, a dead fish, a rose and a “Stop” warning on her car. Later law-enforcement proceedings connected the threat to the Anthony Pellicano (b. 1944) investigation.
Contemporary coverage sometimes portrayed Busch herself as excessively dramatic. Nikki Finke’s 2005 profile combines harsh descriptions of Busch’s temperament with a strong defense of her reporting and an admission that journalists had underestimated a threat that turned out to be real. See Finke’s 2005 Busch profile. The lesson is that “drama,” “conflict” and “paranoia” cannot be coded from journalistic reputation alone. Some of what looks like temperament is response to actual threat.
Busch later returned to the trade press as film editor at Deadline after Finke’s departure. Her work there looked much more like high-speed institutional reporting than personality media. She broke casting and acquisition stories under her own byline. Anita Busch herself never became the central commodity in the way Nikki Finke had.
This gives us a matched contrast. Two aggressive female Hollywood reporters. Two formidable source networks. Two reputations for conflict. Both eventually associated with Deadline. The platform-personality fusion occurs with Finke and only weakly with Busch. Aggressive temperament plus Internet does not automatically produce an e-personality. Something else is required. Finke wanted the continuous author-centered outlet and built it. Busch retained a stronger reporter-and-editor identity within publications. The occupational role can remain dominant even when the technology and the temperament would permit its dissolution.
D. J. Waldie (b. 1948) belongs as an adjacent Los Angeles literary control. He was on the edge of Seipp’s social circle, and commanded its love and respect.
Waldie is best known for Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, whose architecture consists of hundreds of brief numbered sections. The form long predates Twitter and mature blogging. The Los Angeles Times has described the short chapters as part of the book’s distinctive literary method. Brevity is not a digital diagnosis. Fragmentation is not a digital diagnosis. Short units can result from slow aesthetic discipline.
In 2013 he confessed that he had once told an audience at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books that blogging was not really writing but something more like talking. After several years writing online for KCET, he had changed his mind. See Waldie on learning to write online. The medium did not turn him into a reactive pundit or a self-brand entrepreneur. His online writing remained tied to the same subjects that structured his books: Lakewood, Los Angeles, suburbanization, memory, ordinary landscapes and civic life. His current site presents books, essays and online commentary as parts of one long effort to understand place. See D. J. Waldie’s website.
The digital platform changed Waldie’s opinion of digital publication. It did not change the scale of his attention. There is a reversal worth pausing on. Waldie was producing tweet-sized literary units before Twitter existed, through a slow book-writing process. The external form tells us nothing about the internal friction. He is one more reason to abandon word count as a proxy for impulsivity.
Adam Parfrey (1957-2018) took Cathy’s virginity and remained a friend after their relationship died (though she disliked much of what he published). He may be the best pre-digital control for one of Aboujaoude’s darkest claims.
Parfrey founded Feral House in 1989, long before social media and before the commercial Web. Its identity was built around material that mainstream publishers regarded as too disturbing, disreputable or commercially marginal. The list ranged across occultism, extreme political movements, crime, fringe culture, music and material selected partly because other institutions would not touch it. See Los Angeles magazine on Parfrey and Feral House.
My 2003 interview with Parfrey captured the mismatch between public product and private manner. I encountered a soft-spoken, shy publisher in comfortable slippers whose catalogue encouraged outsiders to imagine something considerably more demonic. That is fascinating through Virtually You. Here is something resembling an e-personality without the e. The publishing identity is transgressive, aggressive and boundary-testing. The everyday individual can be quiet and restrained. The separation between ordinary person and public transgressive persona does not require a digital environment. A publishing imprint can perform the same social function. Parfrey described Feral House as extreme and ornery and said that the books reflected his broad interests rather than a narrow program. See Parfrey discussing Feral House.
Recent scholarship has challenged the older interpretation in which Parfrey’s proximity to extreme political material could always be explained as anthropological fascination or transgressive play. A 2024 Los Angeles Review of Books discussion of Spencer Sunshine’s research reports private correspondence suggesting that some figures in Parfrey’s underground milieu were more sympathetic to extreme-right ideas than their public ambiguity suggested. Parfrey’s transgressive publishing cultures already supplied many of the affordances now associated with the Internet: alternative distribution, fascination with forbidden information, contempt for mainstream gatekeepers, provocative identity, a loyal subcultural audience and status gained by crossing boundaries. The Internet scaled these phenomena. Parfrey is the strongest analog control for the entire “darkness” component of Virtually You.
The Roderick-Finke and Busch-Finke comparisons are the two strongest yields of the enlarged sample. They give us controls inside the same Los Angeles journalism environment. Finke versus Roderick asks why two veteran journalists freed from legacy institutions built such different independent media identities. Finke versus Busch asks why two combative Hollywood reporters exposed to the same fast digital trade-press environment had such different degrees of personality-publication fusion. Both comparisons hold professional formation roughly constant and let us see what the Internet does with different underlying architectures.
Parfrey and Waldie push the argument backward in time. Two features easily mistaken for digital effects, transgressive persona and extreme formal compression, were already available under analog conditions. Feral House was a subcultural attention machine before subcultural attention machines went online. Holy Land was Twitter-shaped prose before Twitter. The Internet scaled and monetized these forms. It did not invent them.
The remaining figures fill in the middle. Rensin shows that a writer can resist blogging’s tempo and the accompanying dangers of the e-personality. Gillespie shows that a preexisting irreverent digital style can become compatible with institutional discipline. Thompson shows that personality and niche obsession can become professionally productive when the subject matter enforces its own checks. Breitbart shows what happens when platform logic becomes an explicit theory of political warfare. Richmond shows the blog becoming a second channel through which a writer contests his own institution.
The Internet is not the dose by itself. The consequential unit is the interaction among temperament, professional formation, publication friction, audience reward and the kind of public self a particular medium makes valuable. Feral House made one kind of self valuable in 1989. Twitter makes a different kind of self valuable in 2026.
Digital platforms reorganize the rewards attached to being a writer. They lower some restraints, strengthen some impulses, make personality economically valuable and expose writers to continuous feedback about which versions of themselves audiences want. The outcome depends on what the writer carried into the environment and what remains outside it.
That gives the Seipp circle a significance beyond Los Angeles journalism. It is a cohort caught at the right historical moment. Its members were professionally formed before the personality-driven Internet reached maturity, but most lived and worked long enough to adapt to it. Their archives allow us to compare the writer before and after the feedback architecture changed.
The deepest transformation was from a world in which institutions decided which parts of a writer reached the public to a world in which platforms, audiences and writers continuously negotiate which version of the writer will appear.
Cathy’s crowd became an experiment in what happens when the writer no longer has to wait for permission to speak.