Caching out

ON A WING AND A GLARE Elizabeth McQuern did things for herself.

On September 3, two days before the Bastion comedy blog shut down, the site’s regular “New Video Wednesday” roundup posted a link to green improviser Joe Avella’s work. He immediately blogged on his personal page: “I’ve read the Bastion on-and-off since I got ‘into the scene,’ ” the post read, “and it was always a short-term goal to get mentioned on it or have a video posted.”

Bastion writer Kristy Mangel saw it as a sign. “I realized the site was bigger than any of us thought it was,” she says.

But what was the site, exactly? For more than two years, the Bastion served as a news-and-gossip site that posted show write-ups often mistaken as reviews. Ostensibly all-encompassing, it tended toward the same set of performers. Yet why was it the only independent blog that regularly covered local comedy?

Before the Bastion, there was, and still is, its parent site, the Apiary. In May 2005, New York blogger Nate Sloan founded the Apiary after noticing a plethora of locally focused music blogs but no one writing as prolifically about comedy. So he set out to give New York’s comedy the same daily-blog weight its music had—by spotlighting both community happenings and rising talent. The rules were simple: “Make it fun, link often, don’t poop on anyone,” Sloan says. So nothing negative…ever. “Writing about comedy is in its infancy,” he adds. Meaning: Egos bruise easily in these parts.

The Apiary soon made enough ad money for site maintenance, so a year later, Sloan launched the outpost the Bastion. To run the site—without pay—he tapped Chicago bloggers Mangel and Elizabeth McQuern. While Mangel was already a stand-up scenester, McQuern was a newbie, having only recently arrived in Chicago to take writing classes at Second City; she wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Nate said, ‘Just write about shows you’re going to anyway; don’t feel like you have to write about everything,’ ” recalls McQuern, who became the Bastion’s editor to Mangel’s writer. Early posts reflected her comedy-hungry nature: links to local stand-ups in the media, day-after takes on new sketch shows and gossip about Lorne Michaels’s recruiting visits.

“I really liked writing everything from the fan’s point of view,” says McQuern—a really, really positive fan, that is—“but we would flip-flop: Sometimes it was a fan blog and sometimes it was more like traditional media.” But did they ever come to a consensus? “I guess not,” she concedes.

Apparently, neither did their readership. Mangel notes that while many understood the Bastion’s high subjectivity, some saw it as a platform to solicit media-swaying opinions. She and McQuern were attracting some big-time readers—including admitted fan Bert Haas, booker for Zanies Comedy Clubs—which meant comedians who felt they deserved a shout-out started with the pestering. Mangel once heard from a desperate comic, “If you don’t mention our show, how will the Tribune ever know about it?” Those who got a mention on the Bastion used the blurb in their PR materials.

Meanwhile, McQuern was attracting attention of her own. In March 2007, she began performing stand-up (she auctioned her stage fright on eBay), where she met the comics she’d written about. The following October, she took over as coproducer of Chicago Underground Comedy. No longer an anonymous, unaffiliated blogger, McQuern found her time disappearing to paid freelance work. She tried many times to get contributors on board, but few stuck around. “There’s just more work involved than people realized or were willing to put into it,” she says. Three weeks ago, with Mangel also slammed and no one stepping up, McQuern and Sloan decided to pull the Bastion’s plug.

Despite its short, amorphous stint, the Bastion filled a void. It was an update site for outsiders and an accessible outlet for comedians hurting for exposure. It surveyed the scene through a biased lens, but readers were okay with that. Yet if the comedy community truly valued the Bastion’s input, it’s time for its members to step up to the digital plate. “Personally,” McQuern notes, “I’m still puzzled that more people weren’t writing funny blog entries for us to quote from or editing highlight-reel clips of sets or sending photography for the photo posts.” If every other comic who’s complained about the media’s lack of caring registered a domain name, the resulting vibrant, dynamic Chicago-comedy blogosphere would be impossible to ignore.