Special Report
BLUE SHIFT
How BLUE’S NEWS stayed alive and evaded ‘enshittification’ for 30 years
PCG INVESTIGATES
You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? You try to scroll on a website and the ads crowd out the text so thoroughly you have to reload. You want a short guide for collectibles in a new RPG, but beneath Google’s flat-out wrong AI summary there’s only a parade of bloated videos. Pressures to survive in the attention economy have turned countless websites into labyrinths of engagement and monetisation tactics. This spectre of quality decay – this ‘enshittification’ as it was dubbed by journalist Cory Doctorow – extends to just about any service that exists in proximity to capital.
Perhaps that’s why Stephen ‘Blue’ Heaslip’s site Blue’s News is such a stable time capsule of the quaint, uncynical frontier the early internet is remembered as. Created to platform Heaslip’s hobby writing in the ’90s, the site was never about money. It was about something timeless, human and more primordial: Quake hype.