I was at lunch with some blog people today, one of whom wants to recruit an economics blogger and asked for names. I basically drew a blank. All of the high-traffic economics bloggers I read are either professors, in some similarly rewarding profession, or already tied up by a media organization.
I think this is becoming broadly true of the wider blog world: the biggest bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job. I blogged the primary from Matt's house on Tuesday, and almost everyone in the room were being paid to blog. Two years ago, we were all amateurs. That's a skewed sample, of course, but all of us had relatively widely read blogs not only before we took a salary, but before we knew each other. I don't mean to say that there are no high trafficked policy blogs not run by professors or professionals, since this is clearly not true. But the numbers seem to be dwindling. And most of the obvious people of whom I would have said to any media organization "You should hire this blogger" seem to have been hired. I expect the rest to follow soon, since there are fewer arbitrage opportunities. There's a lot more amateur talent remaining in other fields, like science blogging, but I wonder how long this will last.
I'm not sure what this means for the blogging world. It's still largely an amateur medium, but it's hard to see how many new bloggers can compete with someone who gets paid to do it, unless they are independently wealthy or have a job, like journalism or academia, that routinely throws them a lot of bloggable material. Will it become as hard to break into blogging as it is to break into print?
Did it ever occur to you that most people's motivation for blogging isn't to compete? Most bloggers do it because they are hobbyist that enjoy writing, nothing more. Most blogs aren't even about politics or current events. What is it about journalists that always assumes everybody is just dying to be them?
Well, I think a lot of it depends on what your definition of blogging is. You're basically a paid pundit with a column that just happens to be on the Internet instead of on paper and features an infinitely long letters to the editor section with extremely loose editorial oversight (LOL!) There was probably a small window where the Internet made it easier for people to break into punditry that is closing, but it's not as if you (and Matt, and the rest of the Atlantic blogging crew) weren't already qualified in some sense; private school and elite education, or previously employed as a writer for the Atlantic, and so forth. The Internet just made up for the notoriety or connections that you didn't have (which historically came from what? luck? the old boy network?)
What is blogging? To me, in its most fundamental form, it is just people writing about their lives and opinions on the Internet. Back in the good ole days when it was more just geeks on the Internet and you wrote every page by hand in HTML, we just called it a personal web site. People would sometimes write about their lives and issues important to them aside more typical web site stuff like distributing software and papers. Eventually people who found that they did this a lot got sick of all the repetitive work and wrote software packages to automate most of the grunt stuff, and these developed into what you think of today as a content management system. Nowadays the waters have muddied and it is almost called blogging if you are typing something, anything, into a content management system.
I personally think of this as an overly broad term. To me, the "blog" of it is first and foremost the indie aspect; if you are being paid to write, it is a column, not a blog. Secondly, it is probably the inanity of it (and I mean that in the most endearing way possible); if the site in question is less than fifty percent the personal life of the author, it is a column and not a blog. So I wouldn't say so much that blogging is "going professional" so much as bloggers are "selling out" and taking advantage of the opportunities with Big Media that were opened up as a result of the notoriety that they achieved in their blogging.
But, you know, the real facet of the mainstreaming of the Internet that made it such a disruptive technology was never the format; it was and remains the fact that anyone can publish whatever they want to a global audience, without the advantage of an elite education, connections, or passing editorial muster. Now getting page views, that is another story.
It's always been hard to break into blogging, if by "break" you mean become reasonably well known and well linked. I don't see that necessarily changing because Big Media has blogs.
The barrier to entry is low and will remain so as long as Google owns Blogger. The hard part will be getting attention with the millions of others doing the same.
I think someone who has interesting things to say and has the drive to make connections (easier now with all the tools available) can still break through.
Also realize there is churn. Good webloggers will get tired/bored and go away. So there will still be opportunities to fill niches.
Did it ever occur to you that most people's motivation for blogging isn't to compete? Most bloggers do it because they are hobbyist that enjoy writing, nothing more. Most blogs aren't even about politics or current events. What is it about journalists that always assumes everybody is just dying to be them?
Vinegar, Fruit Loops, and a side of Ham...'tis a marvelous thing.
At any rate, for people blogging about topics that are likely to draw a readership, the above observation doesn't change the fact that readers interested in topic 'x' are finite in number and have a finite supply of time, so yes, West Virginia, there IS competition. Anyone who doesn't think so has not spent much time observing how newer bloggers will tenaciously spam out their requests for links and engage in blogroll barter with newfound friends and enemies, very much like a young author/cartoonist attempting to get published/syndicated.
Once the pioneers of the medium advance and establish it as a Big Thing, there will be a lot more people looking for a slice of the action, and finding it correspondingly harder to go beyond the "personal thoughts about how my life sucks but my sweet cat Petunia makes it better, sometimes" and generate opinions that both have broader appeal, and attract a corresponding readership.
Is it ironic that a very great many amateur bloggers are doing it in hopes of someday getting into print?
Let's rewrite this, substituting "telephone" for "blog":
It occurred to me that that most people who use the telephone are not paid to do it, but actually have other jobs, and only use the telephone incidentally, or in the course of actually doing their job.
I think this is becoming more broadly true - a lot of the people who use the telephone have other ways to make a living, besides using the telephone!
I went over to someone's house and used his telephone for a while, and some other people were doing it too. Everyone looked at each other and it was like, why are we here, using the phones?
It seems hard for us telephone users to compete with others, who use the telephone of course, but not exclusively, and perform other functions too.
And most of the obvious people of whom I would have said to any media organization "You should hire this blogger" seem to have been hired.
Ahem. Next time you're throwing names around, please do consider mine!
However, I must agree with Kalynne that most amateur bloggers (which, after 5+ years I hope I'm no longer considered as one of) do hope to get into print.
And, at this point you should lather, rinse and repeat that first paragraph.
Can you arrange to be a libertarian economics blogger :)?
"Can you arrange to be a libertarian economics blogger :)?"
Yes, although I call myself a classical liberal. As long as it's not that Economist gig again: I a) failed rather last time, the others in the competition being rather better at it than I and b) got ever so slightly pissed off that the powers that be never in fact either detailed what the deal was nor actually told me what the results were.
Paid? How much?
I like to think what I do helps make my income, which has increased since I started, but I can't prove that blogging caused it, as I don't bill my clients for pithy, clever posts. Or even the posts I do.
Certainly I'm always open to a more lucrative blogging gig that involves less work and no busy season.
Try being a registered nurse in an ER! : D
Tons of bloggable stuff! Been doing it for almost three years now. I get some money from advertising, but I would KILL for someone to pay me to do it full-time! : )
Maybe another area ripe for the professionalization you're talking about is the state and local level blogosphere where there are a ton of talented people mostly talking about things that matter a lot to locals, but get little or sporadic coverage in the national level blogosphere.
Take the blognetnews section on virginia public affairs bloggers -- there are something like 150 or 200 active in any week and there are a good 20-25 whose work could easily appear on a newspaper web site.
Maybe another area ripe for the professionalization you're talking about is the state and local level blogosphere where there are a ton of talented people mostly talking about things that matter a lot to locals, but get little or sporadic coverage in the national level blogosphere.
Take the blognetnews section on virginia public affairs bloggers -- there are something like 150 or 200 active in any week and there are a good 20-25 whose work could easily appear on a newspaper web site.
Uh, hookers are professionals too. There are also professional dog walkers. Being a professional means nothing, in and of itself, except some amount of money comes your way. It bestows no status (although many professionals have that mistaken opinion) and it bestows no authority (ibid).
I would also say that the better bloggers are not professionals in their fields, but simply people who write well.
One of the worst things that can happen to this new venue is for the ego of being paid to change the blogger. Becoming overly concerned with getting hits will necessarily pollute the output, causing the blogger to focus on creating some artificial phenomenon to pull hits instead of writing well. These people quickly become trite and boring to read.
Writing is about being read, not about getting hits. That's what hookers are for.
If you become a professional blogger, how would that differentiate you from big media? Besides the regular paycheck in exchange for your work?
Gee, Megan:
"independently wealthy or have a job, like journalism or academia, that routinely throws them a lot of bloggable material."
Yup. The elite. Like Janet Cooke. Gene Weingarten. Not to mention that peer-reviewed, tenured Indian, Ward Churchill. Elite. Got to have a Columbia Journalism degree. Like Herodotus. Or Thucydides. Or Ed Murrow. And got to be REALLY smart, like the guy who picked a Communist agent to design the United Nations for him.
In Art Buchwald's memoir about how he got into the writing game he said that his editor at the Paris Edition of the International Herald Tribune was a former prize fighter. Probably a pretty good editor, too, but not nearly so precious.
There used to be a song in the fifties that maybe all elites should learn the lyrics to so they can sing them to each other: "We belong to a mutual admiration society - my baby and me."
Certain topics like economics will always be difficult to break into unless one has a great deal of expertise so that the blog can engage various issues back in forth with other blogs in the same field in a meaningful way.
It's hard to get on board with the "social" aspects that help you get read. As an introvert, I've never really asked to be blogrolled, and only recently added all the little doodads (technorati, sitemeter, feedburner) that are a sign of paying attention to readership. But I don't post enough, or link enough to others, nor do I want to write simply to write.
I would love to be paid though. For as low as 2K a month, I would never leave my computer (except for The Office, to order Chinese, and to stick my head outside for 2 minutes to see what time of day it was).
The problem for me isn't that there aren't opportunities for professional blogging. The problem is that there aren't opportunities that will pay as well, and have as great benefits, as my tech job at a company in northern VA.
Which is not to say I'm not open to the right offer. But I'm one of those niche bloggers. I write about Jewish and Israeli issues, and that's not enough to pay a full-time salary.
Meantime, I'm pretty happy doing what I'm doing. And with no editorial oversight.
Megan,
I've found a lot of the problem is the people hiring bloggers, and other social media types, don't understand what they're hiring.
A blogger, in a job description, is interactive with a community. That's what brings the outsized gains in profile and SEO. A writer is a different beast entirely. They are two different jobs.
"Hiring a blogger" is often a cheap way of getting an unknown to write for less than a professional, but that's not the way to look at any hire. What do they wish to accomplish? And what does a person need to know to accomplish it?
The landscape has changed a lot since you started writing, and the idea that early adopters had all the advantage simply isn't true. Breaking into an area is actually quite easy, if you know how to hire the right people. It's not easy for someone who only writes, but social media is bigger than blogging, and in the marketing and PR spaces, people are starting to get it. Using Digg, SU, Twitter, video, and social networks, you an outsize a reputation in a short period of time, specifically in niche like economics.
Ironically, we all suffer from a bit of selection bias in this arena - but rest assured there are dozens of capable people that play in different pools, and could accomplish the goals your friends want to achieve.
If your blogfriends are still looking to hire, have them drop me a line.
Blogging isn't a pathway into better paying/higher profile media gigs?
"Blogging isn't a pathway into better paying/higher profile media gigs?"
Has been for me. I've used it instead of the unpaid intern jobs so common in media jobs. Can't insist that it will work for everyone, but I will admit to looking over my shoulder at the next generation.
(No, you haven't heard about me or read me, I'm a Brit.)
Thank gosh I'm just an amateur. Those who are paid to blog by an institution generally do what that institution wants, and the institution hires them knowing they won't make waves.
For instance, the five Atlantic "voices" I've "listened to" (Megan, Matt, Marc, Ever-Excitable Andy, and Ross) all oppose immigration enforcement and have spread disinfo on the topic.
The most egregious example was this, something that Ambinder has not followed up on despite me leaving a few comments on later entries suggesting that he might want to have some journalistic integrity.
Megan, I'm a very contented blogger in a very small niche - genealogy research technology. I enjoy developing my writing skills, but I am thrilled to be a member of an active and growing community of genealogists and family historians. We're still trying to define the relationships that have developed as a result of our blogging, but we are certainly enjoying them.
Sure, I'd like to generate enough revenue to pay for my addiction (genealogy as well as blogging), but I won't be giving either up anytime soon.
Paying me to blog, in any field, is the equivalent of asking me to relocate and take a job in New York City.
"Move to NYC? Sure. I'll give up my guns and my suburban house for living unarmed in a tiny apartment in the world's most revolting city, for a minimum salary of $450K."
"Write weekly columns on [x topic]? Sure. I'll give up my editorial freedom for $2K per piece."
In other words, I'm not worth the amount of money it would take to get me to do it.
Can you arrange to be a libertarian economics blogger :)?
It's a curious fact of the blogging world that it is over-represented by libertarians. They are as rare as hens teeth in the real world, but you can't go on-line without tripping over them by the bushel.
Those who are paid to blog by an institution generally do what that institution wants, and the institution hires them knowing they won't make waves.
Cato and Reason are two notorious examples of this. Which is wonderfully ironic, since they are both supposedly libertarian. Google "Kochtopus" if you doubt it.
"it's hard to see how many new bloggers can compete with someone who gets paid to do it, unless they are independently wealthy or have a job, like journalism or academia, that routinely throws them a lot of bloggable material. Will it become as hard to break into blogging as it is to break into print?"
I don't know. KathyG has been blogging for about a month, as an amateur as far as I can tell--a graduate student, apparently--and she's schooling your ass like nobody's business.
Not as hard to break in as you think.
The only way I'd spend any time reading the MSM and lefty blogs in order to comment on them for another blog would be if I were paid.
I'm not sure then if I could have been paid enough to watch all the debates or Bill Moyers interviewing soothing Jeremiah Wright's hurt feelings.
I'm not good at digging up news ahead of Instapundit, either. (Although I did note that he hasn't mentioned the report that chickens are the closest living relations to T-Rex.)
Low Key wrote: don't know. KathyG has been blogging for about a month, as an amateur as far as I can tell--a graduate student, apparently--and she's schooling your ass like nobody's business.
Maybe when she gets done with that general region, she can gradually work her way up to the head. One can hope.
I've been reading a lot of political blogs for years and the ones with the most insight are always the ones done by professors or lawyers, professionals in general. Those are the people who not only have decent insights but also write with the most clarity. All manner of idiots write blogs (me, the Daily Kos, etc etc) but not many do it well.
I also made this observation a long time ago. Anyone can make a blog, doesn't mean anyone can do it well.
Tim, we sure have heard about you.
For a free market economics blog I like The Skeptical Optimist at:
http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/
Don't know if he is available for a pro gig, but check him out.
For a free market economics blog, I like The Skeptical Optimist at:
http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/
Don't know if he is available for a pro gig, but check him out.
Interesting post Megan, and very interesting comments. The arguments about "getting paid = selling out" sound so familiar to me as a musician. There was always the cool crowd who would find a band long before they hit the radio or had big successful tours, who would dump them as soon as they became successful and label them "sell outs"
If someone can make money doing what they love more power to them. But just like music most of us blog for the love of it, and if the money comes even better.
All that being said a couple of years ago I fell in love with blogging. So much so that like many musicians I had dreams of actually being able to do it professionally. So I went looking for the blogging tradeshow.
Nothing like that existed. Coincidently I run tradeshows for a living so last year we launched BlogWorld & New Media Expo.
To my delight I was not alone. We had 1,600 bloggers, podcasters internet radio and TV broadcasters join us in Las Vegas last year. We will do it all again this September. I didn't want this comment to come off as a commercial but it did seem relevant to the discussion. If you are interested you can find out more at www.blogworldexpo.com
My blog on health care and stocks is five years old. At one time I had more than 1,000 unique visitors a month. But then I sold the pubs that I was promoting with the blog and let it drop for awhile. My readers went away. Now I've refocused the blog, concentrating more on stocks than policy, and the readership is coming back, slowly. But I'm getting paid, because every time I research a stock or industry, I evaluate investment opportunities. I'll be paid when the stocks I buy go up, and I'm a better investor because the blog forces me to think things through.
If someone wants to pay me to write a financial or economics blog, I'd consider it if it paid very well and involved part time work. Otherwise, I consider myself well paid.
Forbes is looking for bloggers now Donald.
We've all joked about 'taking the Boeing' [I'm not sure the Metro counts :D] but I think there's something to be made of the distinction between bloggers as independent individuals and journalists as MSM employees.
We all gotta do what we gotta do to put the cheese on the table, and there's certainly no dishonor in taking a job in journalism, but it seems to me that the whole point of blogging is the independent voice with a (more or less) fully disclosed set of prejudices, which is very much in opposition to the MSM with their labyrinthian corporate and political interests. Let's just say that I don't spend a lot of time checking out the "blogs" at the newspapers' sites. Not that they don't write very well -- they oughta, they get paid for it -- but there's a certain trust involved. When I read someone's personal blog I've only to ask myself 'is this guy phony or what?' When I read a blog sponsored by the MSM I've always got to wonder 'what did you really think before your editor and advertisers got involved?'
I understand why the MSM want to coopt blogs and I certainly understand why some folks use blogging as a leg up to joining the media. I'm just not sure why you call it "blogging". As a blogger I can say anything I want about anything. I'm not paid, I don't take any sort of advertising, and I'm entirely self-employed, so you can be darn sure when I say something it's entirely self-serving! What more could you ask?
[Sigh] And I just used "entirely" twice in one sentence. Editors can be a good thing..
There are quite a few reasons for this to start. One is that the average American (and most likely the average person) doesn't have a lot of self-confidence any more. Another is that literacy is somewhat of a declining virtue--and bloggers, I think, have to be able to read. Another is that we have no real way to classify interests at this point rather than metadescriptions (bad example, but one easily to mind: "I read science fiction": which varies from Aasimov to Brunner to LeGuin to Zelazny to name but a few--each with a different take and theatre of thought). What society seems to be searching for is a way to pool knowledge. However, any political organization in power would have to see this as a threat. Differing languages for one thing seem to have originated in an easy way to differentiate between friend and foe, and the kind of motivation employed seems never to have disappeared. A social organization that ignores national boundaries will be treated as a threat.
...And a professional is much easier to regulate. So I would say you exist between two sorts of forces...
--Glenn
If being a professional blogger means writing like you are on an assembly line, what's the point?
I have been writing Serge the Concierge which covers food, wine, travel and work-life issues for 3 years now.
I do not make a living from it.
I am not sure where the amateur/ professional line lays.
Does being a professional blogger means working a lot on a major site for little money?
Have a great day
Serge