The "Romenesko" blog (launched in 1999!) was a one-man shop, under the corporate parentage of the Poynter Institute, until fairly recently. It was quite successfully run by its founder, Jim Romenesko, though you could tell every once in a while he'd go through periods of advanced boredom in covering media day-in and day-out. People (well, reporters and editors) mostly loved it; the headlines were, unusually, out-bound links. So it sent traffic. Romenesko's slight summaries were careful and sometimes sly. The "technology" of the site as such was pretty laughable, down to the ridiculous URL. He was super-fast, he was fair and he was, very subtly, often dryly funny. Then [...]

"A fight started and the cop and his friend each punched a man in the face."

"He did it because his friend was taking too long to return with beer."

"An affidavit adds: 'He stated that Burger King isn't a public place and that his genitals get itchy and he sometimes has to scratch them.'"

"For nearly a decade — starting in 1989 — I published a print 'fanzine' called Obscure Publications. Its mission was to review fanzines and profile their editors. In early 1998, I decided to start selling fanzines online through a new site called The Obscure Store. My challenge was to get 'customers' to my website. I decided to do that by linking to stories that I found interesting. I had general interest articles on the top of the page and 'Media Gossip' items on the bottom half. In May of 1999 I decided to create a separate site — MediaGossip.com — for those media stories. It was a life-changing decision: the [...]

The Poynter Institute preemptively discourages you from complaining about today's new redesign of the wonderful Jim Romenesko's blog. (But seriously now, if I wanted to read these embedded tweets by Howie Kurtz and Jeff Jarvis… obviously I'd follow them on Twitter, right?) So? Whatever could readers be complaining about? Let's take a tour of Romenesko throughout the decade!

It's the real end of a very long and sturdy era: sly and quiet media blogger Jim Romenesko will be semi-retiring at Poynter and Slate has laid off loud and jollily abrasive media columnist Jack Shafer, who is now drunk. These two have been the opposing end-caps on the rolling barrel that is media reporting online throughout the entire existence of the popular Internet as we know it. Both will continue to do some work for their current publications, but really they were the last two institutions standing: Richard Johnson left Page Six; Peter Kaplan left the Observer; there is nearly nothing remaining from the Old [...]