Within the span of a few years, everything was different. The music industry was trimming its fat, which left few advertising dollars in circulation, and with the rise of easy-to-use publishing platforms like Blogger and Wordpress—updated daily, sometimes hourly—people were beginning to shift their attention spans to the web en masse. In hip-hop, blogs like Nahright.com, Ohword.com, CocaineBlunts.com and Unkut.com became go-to destinations for new music and commentary, while more expansive sites like Allhiphop.com, HipHopDX.com and Sohh.com featured news updates and interviews.

Waiting all month for a magazine seemed silly.

XXL was certainly cognizant of this, and so they launched a comprehensive website of their own. It, too, featured news and interviews, but its key draw, at least initially, was its blogger section, which championed the musings of Jay Smooth, Byron Crawford, Andrew “Noz” Nosnitzky, Dallas Penn, DJ Drama, Sickamore, Tara Henley and a slew of other rotating characters.

With this, XXL caught a second wind. There was no shortage of fireworks from that group of bloggers. Whether it was Lupe Fiasco or Bun B getting mad at Byron Crawford for doing what Dan Aurberbach of the Black Keys recently called hip-hop “satire,” Dallas Penn producing a collegiate-level content analysis of the simplicity in Soulja Boy’s lyrics, infighting between bloggers or pondering where blogging could go from there, there was always something fun to read on XXLmag.com.

In 2007, after SCRATCH magazine folded, the brand lived on as a blog on XXLmag.com, where I continued to write about DJs and producers. As someone who had been reading the blogs—much like I’d read the magazine, years earlier—I was excited about having the opportunity to write there (“I’m one of the bloggers!”). It was, again, this very fortunate position to be in. ‘Til this very day, in what is often an out-of-sight-out-of-mind type of environment, people still remember that I wrote that blog. That means something to me.

All good things come to end, so after two and a half years I stopped writing the XXL blog. Many of the other bloggers stopped writing, too. Writing every day is a grind, and it was getting harder for everyone to come up with topics. Compound that with the fact that the powers that be—the advertisers, primarily—were beginning to get antsy about the opinionated free-for-all that was happening online, and you can tell where this story is headed. The nail in the coffin was that the reverse-chronological news format became the standard layout for websites—more pageviews man, more pageviews!—and the demand for opinion writing had plummeted.

Still XXL, the magazine, was going strong. And even though the website had seen better days—obviously, I’m very biased here—it kept humming along. But for reasons that have never been quite clear, in early 2008, Elliott Wilson, the face of the brand, was let go. Luckily, a year prior, he and his staff conspired to launch the mag’s most memorable franchises:

XXL’s 2012 Freshman Class included Macklemore and Iggy Azalea

XXL’s Freshmen.

Although it’s slowly changing, hip-hop is one of the few genres that concerns itself more with newer artists than older ones. To that effect, the conversation typically revolves around: Who is everyone talking about? Who is going to become a star? Is this new rapper better than that one?

XXL’s Freshmen issues looked to spotlight a handful of those new artists, and eventually became an annual thing, complete with concerts, tours, mixtapes and all sorts of other assorted stuff. I’ve met a million rappers since the inaugural Freshmen issue, and even the ones who’ve played it cool and said they didn’t care about the XXL cover, eventually confided that they did.

The best part about the Freshmen issues was that it gave the fans something to talk about. On social media, in barbershops, in lunchrooms and on message boards, everyone had an opinion. And even if nobody agreed about who was on the cover— and I mean, absolutely NOBODY — it was at least this thing that became a benchmark of sorts, something artists aimed at and aspired to make it on to.

The Freshmen issues proved that XXL still mattered.