To quote Fran Lebowtiz "A great audience is more important for the creation of great art than great artists are"... We've lost a great, ironic, self aware informed commentariat because a literate, emotionally stable audience for long form content has shrunk. Which means the work isn't there (or at least isn't distributed beyond a few substacks), to perpetuate and expand that audience.

I see the same effect all the time in fiction. Innovative challenging books don't get published (or even picked up by agents), because the publishing industry is run by the kind of people who are frightened and offended by such books. Which means the audience for those books become only those lucky enough to be exposed to older, denser, more innovative fiction - which invariably shrinks.

You've had this fragmentation of attention. Many of the main computer magazines had essentially destination columnists whether writing under their own name or a pseudonym--which periodically passed to a new writer (which in Cringely's case was a matter of some controversy at one point). The latter were often written in a sort of gossipy style intended to make the reader feel that they had an inside view of a company or an area of technology.

It was a different time.

Exactly - these were essentially celebrity gossip columns - I was fond of his - but even more "had-to-read-every-month" was his "PC/Computing" column - which was never about PC's, nor computing - IIRC, it was mostly about Uma Thurman. (IIRC, it was almost as much as an obsession as Tarantino's...)

not "his" PC/Computing column, Penn Jillette's... ugh

Aah! Don't make me worried about Langford!

He appears to be fine, and just published Ansible® 471: https://news.ansible.uk/a471.html