In an article in the Colombia Journalism Review, Chris Mooney argues for the need for bloggers to become officially organised so that we aren’t exploited. However, I remain unconvinced by his thinking.
You need to be aware that in his Wikipedia entry Mooney describes himself as a U.S. journalist who focuses on science in politics. He is the Washington D.C. correspondent for Seed, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and an occasional contributor to many other scientific and news magazines. Additionally, he maintains a weblog, “The Intersection”. In other words, he is a professional writer, not an amateur. A summary of Mooney’s argument is as follows:
- Blog traffic is growing.
- Some blogs are becoming very popular.
- Some blogs have more incoming links to them than prestigeous journalism sites. (The Huffington Post and the Daily Kos have more sites linked to them than The Economist, for example.)
- Some blog sites are generating money from adverstising. (A week-long, premium ad slot on the Daily Kos sells for $9,000.)
- Some bloggers are negotiating payment deals for writing for collective blogs.
- It’s the Wild West out there and standards for payment are not uniform.
- Bloggers need to organise to protect their rights.
- In order to organise in something like a writers’ guild, you would have to distinguish between “blogging for fun” and “blogging for labour” with only the latter being allowed to join any guild.
I found this article intensely annoying (which is why I am blogging about it). The whole thing had the feel of someone who was a professional writer not really taking on board that for the vast majority of bloggers, money doesn’t come into it and probably never, ever will.
If you make your living from writing you are used to making deals with offline publishers and deciding whether or not to submit, depending on the terms offered. I cannot, for the life of me, see why writing for popular and paying blogs should be any different. I can see that for a professional writer submitting to the kind of blogs mentioned above is a welcome additional source of income. If they want to pay you, whether it is for an offline publication or an online blog, you can decide whether to submit or not.
Most of us blog for a whole variety or reasons, accepting that money will not start flowing through the letterbox. Here are some that I have come across:
- A lot of people ‘journal’ offline anyway. Blogging is a way of doing that, and possibly getting some possible feedback on the inner world being expressed.
- It gives you something to do when you are bored at work.
- Human beings like to be creative and express themselves, and blogging (like painting or photography or playing a musical instrument) is just another form of that.
- Human beings feel some things very strongly, and blogging can be a vehicle for giving a degree of publicity to ideas.
- Putting something into language (especially written language) for others helps you learn - helps you sort out your inner blobs of ideas into something more coherent and fit for human consumption.
If you have other reasons, I would be very interested in hearing about them. For most of us, blogging is an expressive and creative pastime - something profoundly human and often fun.
I don’t see the need for bloggers to be formally divided into the amateurs and the professionals. Bloggers who do decide to make a living out of it could join existing writers’ guilds if they wanted to. Most such writers would not become professional overnight and would inevitably face times of not having enough income from blogging to qualify for any blogging guild membership and may therefore be disadvantaged if online publishers only dealt with guild members. And such a restriction would mean that writers from a range of countries would inevitably face impossible hurdles to climb before making any money.
Part of Mooney’s argument rests on a 2001 US Court case. Six freelance writers took on The New York Times. The writers had been paid for their work which appeared in print, but were not paid when the articles were put online. The writers won the right to be compensated for online work. Mooney writes: “It only takes the tiniest of logical leaps to apply this ruling to the work of bloggers.”
But, the vast majority of bloggers are amateurs and not writing for profit in the way the other journalists were. The journalists were arguably exploited by someone making a financial gain by continuing to use their material. Bloggers control when and what they publish themselves. If someone abused their material they could, in theory, seek compensation. But the payment would be for the abuse of material, not because they were bloggers per se.
I can remember in the bad old days when the internet was mainly about finding out information, and when it took longer to do than a visit to a decent library. Now, the net is about so much more than information gathering. All over the world human beings are using it to express themselve and interact, and I certainly don’t yet see a compelling need to start dividing such people into sheep and goats.
I an understand that professional writers would feel the need to protect their rights and, now that blogs are becoming an important part of the professional writers’ world, that writers should seek protection there as well, either by making sure that current legislation covers blogs or by obtaining extensions to the law so that it does. But we are not all professional writers and, as you say, we blog for many different reasons.
People join together in clubs, guilds and associations all the time and if some bloggers want to form a bloggers’ association they will of course do so, with or without our agreement. That’s fine by me as long as such associations don’t gain some sort of real or implied power over the rest of us. I can already imagine news reports beginning “Joe Bloggs, Secretary of UK Bloggers, which speaks for all British bloggers, said…” or the government making legislation, claiming to have consulted “bloggers” after merely speaking to some association or other. We may even need to create an Association of Independent Bloggers to guard against that!
I cannot say whether I would or would not join a bloggers’ association. It depends on what its aims and intentions were and how well it carried these through. My reaction is to say that I would not join such an association unless I felt there were very good reasons for doing so. Too often, associations gather power for the organizers without being particularly beneficial to the members.
We already have a simple, if somewhat fuzzy association for bloggers. It’s called The Blogroll. If I like your blog I put you in mine and if you like mine, you put me in yours. This widening circle of friendship and approval may be disorganized but it is useful: I often discover (and then comment on) blogs that I have come to appreciate after finding them on someone else’s blogroll.
My final remark is that membership of an association can be helpful but can also be constricting. While it should in theory be possible to create an association which is helpful without being constricting, very few such actually exist. The heavy hand of politics all too readily assumes control.