Looking back at 2024 from the bloghouse

Bryan Alexander 2024-12-30

I want to close out 2024 with a look back at the year on this blog.

You see, one of the rewards and pleasures of blogging is the way it expresses and illuminates emerging ideas. A blogger might have plans for what they’d like to do with their site over time, but life often intervenes. New topics appear. The process of writing yields emergent themes. Over time some unexpected patterns become evident.

So let me look back on this blog over the past twelve months. I’ll try to be objective.

Subjectively, I thought I wrote a lot about climate change and politics, probably one post per week.

Objectively… according to site analytics, I published 68 posts, or a little more than one per week, about every five days. I had been hoping for two per week, but the year was much busier than expected.

The posts which received the most attention (as in >1,000 views each) were, in descending order of clicks:

Two themes are obvious from this: politics and academic cuts. I made a decision in 2023 to do more with the former, but thought I’d look more to climate change and the future of politics. Trump’s resurgence shifted things, as I sought to help academics and general readers prepare for what is now happening, his second administration. Along those lines we did an online, open, and extended reading of Project 2025. Engagement with that dropped off steadily, unfortunately, at lease in terms of comments and clicks. Through the year I responded to some events, like the awful June presidential candidate debate.

Academic cuts are something I’ve been studying for more than a decade. They play a vital role in the current book project, and I wanted to share that research. People have been forwarding me news reports and telling their own stories about institutions closing, merging, cutting, or trying various forms of these strategies. Stories of campus financial problems have appeared through my email, social media DMs, and in person conversation.

On this blog I organize posts by top-level categories (you can see the list on the right menu bar, down the page a bit) and the number of posts in each is interesting in retrospect. Politics definitely leads with 18 posts, or about one fourth of the lot. Climate change came in second with 13, also confirming my intuition. Enrollment and economics were salient as well at 9 apiece, followed by personal topics and horizon scanning with 7 each.

So a picture emerges of what I wrote here this year. Politics and climate change dominated, and various research angles about higher education continued.

A glimpse of the WordPress backend for this site. I switched analytics services 1/2way through the year, which made doing this post tricky.

I can cite more stats. This blog received between 4,000 and 8500 visitors each month, with around 5,000 to 11,500 pageviews per month. I’m not sure how this stands in terms of the overall blogosphere in 2024, but I’m glad to see that readers and I put the lie to the “blogging is dead” meme, at least on this site.

I’m more interested in how people used this site, especially when they wrote responses to posts. Some of you know I deeply prize conversation throughout my work, from classes to the Future Trends Forum to presentations, and this blog is no exception. Quantitatively, over the past year 360 comments appeared here, about one per day on average. I wrote around 25% of those comments, responding to yours, so that means around 270 responses from other folks.

Which posts received the greatest number of comments? Here are some surprises. My most commented-upon post by far wasn’t about politics or higher ed, but… food. Four years of a vegan diet received 62 responses, around 17% of the year’s total. As a literature and culture person this shouldn’t surprise me, given how powerful food is in our lives. It was also a personal post, focused not on global food systems but on my own habits. And it was a climate change post, because I turned vegan partly for that reason, and food systems play a major role in global warming.

Following that post-comment-behemoth were these posts, ranked and followed by the number of comments they elicited:

This matches the intuition I mentioned at the start of this reflection, that the blog focused on politics and academic institutional cuts in 2024, including combinations of the two (FAFSA, JD Vance against faculty). Note other themes attracting writerly attention: enrollment and demographics, plus teaching.

What can I (and you, dear reader) take away from these datapoints and reflections?

I’m not sure what to make of this site being so focused on politics. I hope I did useful work, but I’m not sure of the real benefits.

The climate change focus is something I continue doing as a higher education futurist. The emerging and upcoming impacts of global warming on academia are vital, although the postsecondary world isn’t doing nearly enough to anticipate and respond.

The posts about enrollment, demographics, and institutional cuts make sense, given my research. (This is one classical reason to blog: to share what one does, develop it further, to garner feedback) Overall, blogging 2024 reflected major themes in my work.

Looking ahead, I plan to continue posting about higher education cuts and climate change. The former seems likely to occur, to be meaningful, and to shape the future of higher ed. The latter is, well, ditto.

I might keeping writing about politics – national politics, that is. I hope to make time for global geopolitics, if I have anything to add to the discourse. For American national politics, though… in 2024 I wrote as a futurist, aiming to help people think about and plan for something which seemed likely to occur. Now that it (a new Trump administration) is happening, I’m not sure what futurist perspective would be useful here – a look at possibilities for the next four years? Additionally, if the new government and its supporters decide to surveil for criticism and punish writers for doing so, blogging the subject might become risky.

I’m still surprised by the vegan food post. I’ve toyed with the idea of spinning off a blog on vegan eating and cooking, but there are already plenty and I don’t have the time.

Depending on how several projects turn out, I might write more about gaming, technology, and the broader future.

Thank you, readers, for reading and responding. What did you make of this site in 2024?