This post by Laura Hazard Owen is a fascinating one. It’s her take on the soft relaunch of GigaOm, the site where she and others used to contribute and which was unceremoniously taken down earlier this year when it suddenly announced it was out of money and could no longer continue as a going concern. Owen and other writers fled to other outlets but now GigaOm is coming back in some form or another, albeit with seemingly a new roster of contributors.

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How you answer the question poised in the title of this post comes down to, I think, whether you’re the kind of person who Retweets breaking news from a media brand or from an individual writer.

When you visited GigaOm or subscribed to its RSS feed – or the recently shuttered The Dissolve or FilmThreat or anything else – you got the breadth of content from an array of writers on a variety of topics, all centered around the site’s core editorial mission (tech, movies or whatever). But when you followed any of the contributing writers you mainly got their pieces along with whatever else they curated from others on the site or elsewhere.

So GigaOm being shut down or now brought back hasn’t impacted my seeing what Mathew Ingram, Stacy Higgenbottom or others have been writing. Same for the writers from The Dissolve. But those writers were almost uniformly also contributing to other sites at the same time they were writing for GigaOm and The Dissolve. So my – and I imagine others’ – picture of those writers was never exclusively tied to one site. And those sites were always viewed as being a collection of freelance writers.

That means that my view of these sites isn’t tied to who is or isn’t writing the posts and so on. Like baseball teams in the era of free agency, players come and go but it largely doesn’t impact my fandom for the team itself. The editorial mission of the site can continue, either by bringing on a new staff of writers or even, as I wrote earlier, by using social media to keep executing against the mission even if there’s no core hub to link back to.

I’m not saying writers are interchangeable. They’re absolutely not. Quite the opposite in fact. They’re more important than ever because social networks have given them the opportunity to step out from behind the media brands that used to stand between them and the audience and interact and promote directly. That lets them build up followings of their own and speak to a unique audience that may not overlap completely with the brand itself.