It’s kind of hard not to be a little saddened by the death of the print media. The increasing inability of advertising to step as a revenue generation model that’s large enough to keep even the mighty New York Times afloat is a little scary. So it’s good to know that I can depend upon the blogosphere to keep some the minds of some of my favorite writers afloat, even if they can’t keep their wallets up in the same fashion.

I owe a great deal of my early grounding in dubstep to the documentation of writer and producer Martin “Blackdown” Clark, whose blog have been an invaluable source of reason and knowledge in documenting the growth and fluctuation of the UK urban music scene. Check his work in XLR8R, Knowledge (sadly now gone strictly online) and the long lost Deuce for examples of wit, wisdom and the ability to call it as he sees it in a time when writers are harder to find.

Notorious ex-NME scribe Simon Reynolds has turned his blog into his own towering spire of despair, happily ready to skewer anything which doesn’t meet his withering standards. When he find’s something he loves, he’s more than ready to preach it till he’s blue in the face. It’s a blog worth reading alone for his few, careful miss-steps alone, but when he’s on, he’s priceless.

Even notorious writer, teacher, theorist and The Wire contributor Mark Fisher is taking the stuff that couldn’t make the printed cut and striking out for brand new territory. The man known to the web bloggoratti as K-Punk has taken the blog to new heights of theoretical surrealism, alternately railing against and preaching the gospel of the blog spawned musical movement known as Hauntology.

Vancouver has a beautiful crop of talented writers that could easily lead this push as well if they wanted to.  The Georgia Straight’s Martin Turenne and Alex Varty are ornery enough to piss off a print audience but have the kind of rapport and verbal acrobatics that could easily make them the next big blog thing if they wanted to be. The Eldridge sisters behind Backstage Vancouver are the sort of cats that could likely have been beat writers in the past, but instead, are breaking their craft on the web and doing beautifully.

Also on the local tip are the kind souls behind Scout Magazine, the only Terminal City foodies I’ve found to actually want to sing high praise of our culinary community without pulling out the knives.  With legendary food magazines like Gourmet biting the dust, the food writers of the world need a place to go, be they in Vancouver or Berlin. To the web my friends, to the web.