BLUE SHIFT

How BLUE’S NEWS stayed alive and evaded ‘enshittification’ for 30 years

- Justin Wagner

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 monetization tactics. This specter 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.

“I was very into Doom,” Heaslip says, with a sort of timeworn fondness that betrays he is very much still into Doom. “I emulated some of what I'd seen people doing to follow Doom and Quake was about to come, so I created a Quake website. I was interested in experimenting with html... I did it on an impulse.”

That impulse came and went in 1996, but nearly 30 years later, Blue’s News persists as a general PC gaming and tech outlet with minimal changes since its inception. Today, Blue’s social media tagline tracks its response to the shifting media world at its flanks, “No AI slop, no sponsored posts. Sorry, not sorry.”