This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

On the internet, 11 years is an eternity.

In January 2006, I joined several of my Salt Lake Tribune compatriots in this new thing called blogging. All the cool kids were doing it, and when has that excuse ever steered someone wrong?

I called my blog The Movie Cricket, a phrase I lifted from Homer Simpson, who once lamented that "I wish I could be a movie cricket." The idea was to give me a place to opine about movie-related topics in quick bursts, not tied to a review of a particular movie or the longer format of my column.

The idea of a newspaper running blogs (fun fact: The word "blog" is a shortened form of the phrase "web log") could be traced back to a familiar source: the fear that the internet was killing newspapers. (The history of journalism is replete with warnings that a new technological advance would mean the end of people reading newspapers. TV was going to kill newspapers, and before that radio, and before that probably the telegraph and the roving troubadour. And yet we're still here.)

Two years later, I had another assignment added to my Tribune portfolio: I took over the Culture Vulture column, writing about pop culture in Utah. The column was launched in 1997 by my friend Brandon Griggs, who wrote it until 1999. Then Dan Nailen, our pop-music writer, took it over for five years, handing it back to Griggs in 2004. When Griggs left the Tribune in 2008 for a job at CNN (where he still works), the column landed with me.

Part of my pitch for taking over the Culture Vulture column was that it should be both a column and a blog — again, allowing for short hits between the weekly long-form writing.

That first year was a decidedly fun time to write the Culture Vulture blog. I went to the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market in the Salt Palace, snapping photos and writing humorous commentary about the more oddball items being pitched to retailers. I hung out with the group Drinking Liberally as they watched, and played a drinking game to, John McCain's speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination. I interviewed and photographed a cross-section of hundreds of "American Idol" hopefuls in a line that wrapped around the downtown venue now known as Vivint Smart Home Arena.

At the same time, on the Movie Cricket blog, I launched a two-year project, The Departed, in which I listed the newspapers that had eliminated their film-critic posts. It was another way to chronicle the shrinking fortunes of the newspaper industry, and it earned me some mention in national publications.

Writing two blogs, alongside the column and my regular movie reviews and other assignments, was fun and challenging — and I even got an award or two out of it. By 2011, though, I was feeling stretched thin. So I pitched another change: Combine the Movie Cricket and Culture Vulture blogs into a single blog, renamed The Cricket, a reference to the insect the seagulls devoured in Utah pioneer legend. (And, because "branding" was a newspaper buzzword at the time, I suggested we also change the name of the weekly Culture Vulture column to The Cricket — which is what you're reading now.)

Since then, The Cricket blog has been a place for me to post short, pithy items about this or that: major concert announcements, Sundance Film Festival slates, Utahns appearing on reality shows, random Osmond sightings or whatever else came into my field of vision. In the past year or two, I admit I haven't been devoting as much time or brainpower to The Cricket blog, and most days the only posts have been the two daily staples: The Daily 3, a morning briefing of noteworthy pop-culture items, and Plans for Tonight, a listings of concerts and other events.

In the six years of The Cricket blog, and the five years I blogged before that, the way people use the internet has changed. The days when blogs were silos of information, accessed by people through their bookmarks, are largely behind us. Now, more people come to a site through a social-media outlet — sometimes Twitter, but mostly Facebook — and select their reading on a post-by-post basis.

With such changes, The Cricket blog has become more trouble to maintain than it's worth for me or The Tribune. So to free up my time for other things, I am discontinuing The Cricket blog as of this week.

The harsh truth is that to write an engaging, worthwhile blog now is an all-or-nothing proposition. If one cannot devote 100 percent of his or her time and attention to it, the blog suffers and becomes irrelevant.

Much of what I had included in The Cricket blog will be available elsewhere on the Tribune's soon-to-be-revamped website. (For example, our pop-music writer Eric Walden will be handling concert announcements, a job I took on because we didn't have anyone in Walden's job for a couple of years.) I'll still be all over The Tribune, in print and online, with my weekly Cricket column, my movie reviews, my reporting and anything else that comes up.

I'll miss The Cricket as a blog, but I'm honestly excited to see what new challenge will take its place.

Archives of The Cricket in daily blog form can be found at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow Sean P. Means on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.