...my traffic is within the top 20 of all liberal blogs, which isn't bad for a solo blogger like myself. I've won awards, even. But one week shy of my third anniversary and I'm back to doing this for free. I may be a raving leftist, but I have to live in this capitalist world.
There is an element of the Bataan death march to daily blogging when you do it for three years running. I write slowly and do a lot of research and reading, so it takes more time than is readily evident. Every minute of it is fun, of course, but it's still ridiculous. In fact it's so much fun that I would never expect to make serious money doing it. Life could not possibly be that sweet. But I can't justify doing this without any compensation at all either.
There are fewer and fewer solo bloggers these days. Some have joined blogging communities like Daily Kos or TPM Cafe. Others have hooked up with MSM or progressive organizations. And still others have brought contributing bloggers on board, with the result that though they now blog minimally, their blogs keeps going.
A few stragglers remain: Atrios, Digby, John of Crooks and Liars, Jane and Reddhedd of Firedoglake, Avedon Carol of Sideshow. I'll include myself in this group, which I liken to sole practitioners in a world of corporate law firms.
It's tough at the end of the year to realize how many hours were spent blogging instead of at gainful employment. When blogging is but a guilty pleasure, at some point it has to stop.
The solution, as I see it, is for MSM to pay bloggers. They can either hire bloggers rather than their already overworked reporters and staff writers to contribute articles, columns or blogs on their mega sites (without restricting the blogger's individual blog) or they can pay bloggers for the right to cross-post select blogposts on their sites. As to the bloggers who repeatedly appear on the cable news networks, and I'm one of them, it's time to stop doing it for free. If each of us insisted on being paid, particularly in this upcoming election year, the networks would have to do it.
Only lawyers do tv night after night for free, and it's because they let the networks get away with it. From 1997 through 1999, they paid scores of us legal analysts. Our mistake was continuing to go on for free when the contracts expired, because by then they figured out that most lawyers would go on for only the exposure. Big, big mistake. It's one that's too late for legal analysts to rectify, but it's not too late for bloggers, for whom air time is just in its infancy.
When I guest-post for Eric Alterman, he and MSNBC make money, I don't. If I cross-post at Huffington Post, and Yahoo News reprints it, Yahoo makes money by selling ads next to my article while I don't get a dime. When CNN fills airtime with its reporters talking about what I'm writing and displaying TalkLeft, or even airing segments with me discussing blogging, I don't get a nickel. That's not fair. The same goes for radio. At the other and much more enlightened end of the MSM spectrum is 5280, Denver's award-winning, glossy, monthly magazine, that pays me to blog daily about Colorado issues on its website, which benefits us both.
Until I read Digby's post today, I never thought much about how MSM and blogs need to establish a financial synergy. But they do. MSM needs to smell the coffee and realize that real bloggers, not in-house columnists, will bring fresher, more spirited material and more pairs of eyes to their ad-studded websites and airwaves. MSM should follow the footsteps of 5280 and hire respected and credible bloggers as free-lancers. Or they should pay bloggers to syndicate some of their existing blog posts on their sites. And if they want to repeatedly use a particular blogger on radio or tv, they should pay them for their services.
Until that happens, bloggers are going to periodically reassess their time commitment to blogging because of the financial drain. When they do, the blogosphere runs the risk of losing them.
Don't take a chance that Digby will decide at year's end that the balance sheet has become too lop-sided. Show some * heart * now. Digby's voice is too unique and too important to lose. In fact, now that I think about it, as you're putting a little something in the pocket of your paperperson, housekeeper, doorman, shoe shiner, hairstylist, secretary, whomever.....think about the bloggers whose sites you read day after day either for enjoyment or enrichment, and make a note to add them to your gift list. If ever there was a week to do it, this is it.
Now, go visit Digby.
