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Original Blogger Dead at 64
February 21, 2005
Welcome to TNL.net. If you like this content, you may consider subscribing to the RSS feed.By now, it’s hardly news to anyone that writer and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson has committed suicide. However, what I have not seen in all the commentaries I’ve read today is the impact he had on the blogging world.
It is funny that I had not thought about this before but Hunter S Thompson was the original blogger. His mix of personality and reporting represented a lot of what bloggers do. He fought the mainstream media from the outside and then from the inside. Throw in a few hyperlinks in his writing and you have a blog.
I’m not sure of the reasons behind his decision to take his own life but I know that his disappearance is a big loss for American journalism. In a time when reporters seems to have been cowed into not crossing certain lines and working within established parameters, Hunter S. Thompson stood as a strange anachronism, a real reporter who involved himself in the story, who refused to bend to fads, who believed in being a real reporter.
Between this and the recent passing of George Plimpton, it seems that experiential journalism is taking some serious hits. Beyond that, it seems that another person who was having too much fun doing what he was doing has now passed on, leaving the rest of us a little sadder.
