Whatever Happened to Thought Leadership?
It didn’t die. But it might’ve lost the scaffolding that made it matter.
Two years ago, Jodie Shaw posed a question in a Medium post headlined, “Is Thought Leadership Dead?”With AI-generated content already swamping every channel and corner of the internet, she was wondering if original thinking was already passé—already dead.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I launched Backstory & Strategy two months ago. I committed to posting most weekdays. Since May 15, I’ve written nearly 70 pieces. And honestly, the experience has taken me right back to the early 2000s, when I was blogging at Editor on the Verge.
But this time around, something’s missing.
Back then, I felt like I was part of a community. Not just writing into the void, but part of a loosely connected, deeply engaged crew.
David Cohn, blogging under DigiDave
Amy Gahran, “musing” at Contentious.com
Ryan Sholin at Invisible Inkling
Mel Taylor at Local Media in a Web 2.0 World
Jack Lail at Random Mumblings
Mindy McAdams at Teaching Online Journalism
Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy
There were others, too—Patrick Beeson, Steve Outing, Dave Winer, Alan Mutter, Andy Dickinson, Howard Owens, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Scott Karp.
(And if I missed you, consider this a blanket apology and a long-overdue blogroll update.)
It was a mix of big names and fellow travelers—people experimenting, breaking stuff, sharing notes as they went. The wins, the faceplants, the “does this even make sense to anyone else?” posts. That kind of open process.
This isn’t me pining for the past. People move on. Careers shift. Blogging fell out of fashion. I get it.
But I do wonder if something else moved on, too—something bigger than the platforms.
Where was the baton pass? Did it happen quietly, or did I just miss it?
You could argue that thought leadership didn’t die—it just changed clothes
Podcasts. Newsletters. Conference keynotes. LinkedIn essays masquerading as humblebrags. The volume’s higher. The reach is wider. So maybe the community’s still out there, and I’m the one who wandered off.
Maybe.
But I can’t shake the feeling that something got lost in the shift.
Still, there are bright spots—people still pushing ideas out into the world in ways that feel honest and useful.
Dave Cohn’s This Week In Digital Media text product comes to mind. Rotating hosts, tight curation, and a signal-to-noise ratio that reminds you it was built by humans, not fed to an algorithm.
Mel Taylor’s doing great work on LinkedIn—posting about hyperlocal journalism, but also questioning the assumptions baked into it. His stuff reads more like working notes than finished product, and that’s a good thing.
And on The Journalism Salute, Mark Simon (Journalism Salute) mon has interviewed more than 230 journalists from all corners of the industry. The show isn’t flashy, but it’s steady, and it’s building something. You can feel it.
Some of the folks from the old days are still showing up, too—just in different ways. Jeff Jarvis is still poking the industry with sharp sticks. Jay Rosen’s insights are as pointed and urgent as ever. Steve Outing, Howard Owens, and others have shifted lanes but never really left the road.
It’s not that the thinking stopped. It’s that the places we used to gather around that thinking—comment threads, blogrolls, collaborative prompts—quietly faded away.
So no, it’s not that the thinkers are gone.
It’s that the scaffolding is gone.
What we’re left with isn’t a network—it’s a scatterplot. Smart people doing smart work, but mostly on their own islands.
And maybe that’s fine. Maybe this is what it looks like when ideas travel differently. No blogrolls, no comment threads, just links in newsletters and screenshots on social. The tempo’s faster. The energy’s different.
But I still think we lost something.
Back then, we had things like the Carnival of Journalism—a rotating prompt passed from blogger to blogger, each post building off the last. It wasn’t centralized, but it had momentum. There were blogrolls. Trackbacks. Comment threads that turned into collaborations. We weren’t trying to build personal brands—we were trying to figure stuff out. Together.
And that’s the part I keep coming back to.
It’s not that the voices are missing.
It’s that there’s no shared rhythm. No connective tissue. No trusted system for thinking out loud, and thinking together.
And in a moment where AI can crank out competent, contextless prose on demand, that kind of human-powered thinking—incomplete, iterative, sometimes messy—feels more valuable than ever.
So help me out.
Who’s still doing this work? Who’s asking better questions, offering sharper takes, making you think twice?
Because if this is the next chapter of thought leadership—fractured though it may be—I’d really like to know where it’s happening.