On Hanging Separately
Thursday, April 9th, 2009A year ago, my co-blogger John Hawkins asked me to write at Right Wing News. I’m an independent person. I have my own blog. I like the freedom to write what I want to write. Still, John has a bigger audience and I believe the future is going to be consolidation. United, conservative writers and thinkers have greater power.
But there’s not much money in the game. In fact, for most conservative bloggers, there’s next to no money in the game. Some very good writers, thinkers, strategists and experts who blog get nothing but a good reputation for their efforts. A good reputation doesn’t pay the bills.
In my own case, I doctor to pay for my blog habit. That is, I give away my blogging work for free unless I free-lance an article for an on-line publication. Since writing and politics are my passions, I have viewed blogging as a hobby.
As time has gone on, I’ve seen the trends that John mentions today and it’s getting irksome:
I got a promo from one of them, that shall remain nameless, a few days back. They were bragging that they were running a million dollar ad campaign. While that’s great, as far as I can tell, they’re not spending a cent of that ad campaign on conservative blogs — and do you know how much it would cost to run an ad on every single blog in the conservative advertising network at Blogads for a week? At the moment, only $5,686. That’s roughly 1/176th of the amount they’re going to spend on this campaign, but they’re not even willing to go that far to support the Rightroots that are out in the trenches every day.
In fact, we’ve even gotten to the point now where organizations will pay thousands of dollars on consultants, to hit blogs up for links, instead of just buying ads on the blogs. That’s great for the consultants (and I can tell you that from personal experience), but it sucks for the bloggers who get nothing but link requests out of it while some consultant pockets a fat check just for writing a few emails that generally don’t produce any results.
The consultants don’t just want links. They want friendly stories. They want candidate exposés.
During the last election, do you know who advertised on my site? C-Span. That’s right. C-Span appreciated my election coverage and live-blogging, but the Republican party probably didn’t know I existed. Well, there’s a few of us who live blog these big events and draw a crowd. It would be in a candidate’s best interest to know these people–Ann Althouse, VodkaPundit’s drunk blogging, and I are pretty darn consistent. And yet, no ad dollars from campaigns.
Part of the problem is that political bloggers focused nationally have a national audience. That is, since I don’t focus on Houston issues, my readership isn’t local. Ironically, I think I’d have an easier time with advertising if my readership were primarily local–even if the readership was smaller.
Since my readership is national and broad–political and cultural interests–fewer advertisers are interested. Doesn’t matter that the readership is educated, upper income, and fertile soil for certain products.
Will hanging together help to change the money problem? I don’t see how. If bloggers join together, it doesn’t guarantee that think tanks, lobbyist groups, candidates or other conservative groups will suddenly get generous and spend parts of their budgets online.
In fact, there’s been a strange derisiveness about bloggers by those on the right. Political consultants gingerly ask for help here and there, but don’t give much in return. And it’s not just a problem on the right. Yesterday, Jane Hamsher and Kos noted the same problem at the Plumline:
A number of these top bloggers agreed to come on record with me after privately arguing to these groups that they deserved a share in the ad wealth and couldn’t be taken for granted any longer.
“They come to us, expecting us to give them free publicity, and we do, but it’s not a two way street,” Jane Hamsher, the founder of FiredogLake, said in an interview. “They won’t do anything in return. They’re not advertising with us. They’re not offering fellowships. They’re not doing anything to help financially, and people are growing increasingly resentful.”
Hamsher singled out Americans United for Change, which raises and spends big money on TV ad campaigns driving Obama’s agenda, as well as the constellation of groups associated with it, and the American Association of Retired Persons, also a big TV advertiser.
“Most want the easy way — having a big blogger promote their agenda,” adds Markos Moulitsas, the founder of DailyKos. “Then they turn around and spend $50K for a one-page ad in the New York Times or whatever.” Moulitsas adds that officials at such groups often do nothing to engage the sites’s audiences by, say, writing posts, instead wanting the bloggers to do everything for them.
Some on the right were snarky, but the problem is universal.
Blogging, at the forefront of New Media, is a more intimate and friendly way to get a message to people. Politicians, lobbyists, writers hawking books,and think tanks, all love the medium when it suits them, but don’t seem to recognize that people are trying to make a living.
What to do? I don’t really know. Blogging doesn’t yet have the respect and understanding of the political class. And forget social media. Most of the consultants and “experts” I know are stupid about it, so how could their charges have a clue?
Perhaps as the Legacy Media fades, the political class will put their money where it counts more. Still, why pay for what you get for free?
You’ll Laugh, You’ll Cry
Friday, March 13th, 2009Maxine Waters scandal….Democrats sure are rich!
This just in: The World Is NOT In Fact Ending At This Present Moment. All Crisis Talk Was Just For My Own Amusement….Oh, And It Was Politically Useful. And It Was Fun!
Enforcing the Country of Birth Proof clause…a new bill.
About Syracuse: I watched the game through the second overtime–the in-laws are huge Syracuse fans (season tickets!). Being from the Big Ten and being that Syracuse are the perennial under-achievers, I mostly watch so I can make fun of them. Not last night. The hubby asked me who I thought would win after the second OT. I said,”Whomever is in the best shape.” But Six overtimes? That comes down to mental strength….everyone is worn out by then.
With all due respect, Allah, my in-laws bleed orange and they said the basket didn’t count, though, my reaction was the same as yours, “How do you not give the shooter the benefit of the doubt when it’s that close?” With instant-replay, that’s how.
Sarkozy does Mexico “without one faux pas” while Obama offends Brazil, Mexico and Britain. Winning the world, he is.
Finally, it’s Iowahawk Day. Dave Burge is the satirist-in-chief. I have had a hawt blog-relationship with Iowahawk from my beginning blog days. He put up pictures of muscle cars and hot jail-babes. He drinks Scotch and wins brawls. He’s a manly blogger in a league of pretending boys with poison pens. Read his love advice and letter from the smarty-pants set.
By the way, today is #FollowFriday on Twitter. Come join the party!
When Modern Media Meets Legacy Media
Thursday, March 12th, 2009I’d like to thank Houston Chronicle editors Dwight Silverman and Will Radcliff for inviting me and a bunch of other featured bloggers to observe the editorial process at The Chron and also for some pizza and a bull session afterwards.
You can see who all attended at John Kuglar’s page.
Back in college, I worked in a magazine’s editorial department and the process, though, weekly, and in some cases monthly, was the same. What occurred to me as I listened to editors hash out stories was how differently I take in news in this digital age.
My newspaper of choice 20 years ago was the Wall Street Journal. It still is my newspaper of choice. I just read it online. [I get my local information through the Chron.com]
Other than that, though, nothing else is the same. Most news hitting the paper is days or weeks old. That may not seem like a big deal, but for me, a news and political junkie, it is a big deal. I don’t watch televised news anymore–it’s too personality, rather than fact-based. I don’t read newspapers–it’s stuff I’ve already read and mostly news that does not interest me.
For example, while individual murders happen, they don’t affect me unless they are part of a bigger problem that could affect me–like the Mexican gangs drug wars going on here in Houson or a serial rapist or a bank robber (we’ve had a bunch around my home recently). That’s news I can use. Murders in Pearland are terrible, but it’s just bad information I don’t need to know.
The newspaper gives me news I need and don’t need. On line, I can find what I need. Plus, I can find editorial writers that I like from all over the country and world who may not be syndicated in my local paper.
My relationship to the news has changed fundamentally and I’m guessing yours has, too. And I’m part of the change. I blog from home. I write for a couple online publications. And I’ve done TV for both the BBC in NY and from a “studio”, i.e. my iMac, in my home. That’s how the media has changed. A producer from Scotland, England, or LA can contact me based on my web work. An editor from Israel can ask me to write (my editor at an online magazine works for a US based company but lives in Israel.)
That’s how media has changed.
The Houston Chronicle is one of the best dailies in the country–both editorially and financially. Still, they’re conducting lay-offs in the coming weeks.
I have mixed emotions about the demise of print newspapers, though I surely believe that is coming. What newspapers have is a cadre of investigative reporters doing ground work who have relationships with police, local people, etc. That’s tough to duplicate without money.
But individual reporters, self-funded, have been popping up. The best war reporting from Iraq wasn’t conducted by any newspaper but by independent journalist Michael Yon. Nuanced stories, richly written, with a plethora of juicy details not shared in most major media outlets simply because of space, Yon wrote humanely and accurately in a very difficult situation. As a former military guy, he had great access and understood the context. [He has a must-read piece about The New York Time's reporter David Rohde kidnapped in Afghanistan. Did you know a NYT reporter has been kidnapped? Have you heard about it in the press? No, you haven't. This is a big story.]
More than that, with the immediacy of video and services like Twitter [follow me, @MelissaTweets], people will be reporters. They will take pictures, say what is happening…common people will be the stringers and local people or people across the world will take that information off the “wire” and write about it. Right now, I watch C-SPAN, I watch feeds of the debates and I report and interpret with a clearly revealed bias. People know I come from a conservative-libertarian bent and they filter my information with that knowledge.
Watching the editorial process I felt a little sad. All the decisions I make at my blog every day–what to write about, what’s worthy of printing, what’s news, what isn’t–were made by a team of people for a form of media that is slowly dying.
Still, the online Chronicle, the place I’m writing right here, really is the future. The Chron has paid bloggers (who are very good), but the future is you and me. Citizen-journalists will report and interpret the news and democratically deciding what’s worth reading or not.
Times, they are a-changin’.
Addendum: Something else struck me. Many stories that continue to be hashed out online, get very little play editorially. For example, people on both the right and the left have been discussing the competency of President Barack Obama. And while that’s news for the editorial page of a newspaper, it’s “front page news” online. In addition, big, important pieces of legislation that are being hammered around in the Senate and that have huge impact on southern states like Texas might make the business page, if at all.
More than that, online, the topic can be hammered and delved into in a detailed way. This makes for people who are very informed. So I think there is a lop-sidedness now, in the modern world that didn’t exist in the 50s. People who take their news in from radio or TV or the front page of the paper can be woefully uninformed….or rather, they’re informed, but superficially and on topics the power-brokers and idea-makers don’t pay attention to.
Those who use modern media read what doctors are saying about health care reform, what lawyers are saying about a supreme court decision, what mechanics are saying about cars, what cooks are saying about food, and what politicians themselves are saying about the legislation before them (follow your Congressman on Twitter, there’s a good chance he or she is there). That makes for a differently informed news participant.
Because people tend to inform themselves on what they like, those immersed in the Modern Media may miss some of the broad news strokes. On the other hand, when I had little time to read the paper, I read the front page, the cartoons, and the editorial page. I was missing way more than I feel like I miss now.
For those who still exclusively get their news through the paper, I think the danger is believing that you have all the information. People, like drivers, believe they’re more informed than their neighbor. As I have gotten deeper into the news, what’s concerned me is not the news I know–it’s all the information that’s out there that isn’t shared.
It’s what we don’t know in this deluge of information that can hurt us.
Brutally Honest
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Hits The Millionth Milestone
A visitor from Liberal, Kansas gets the honor.
Flammable Pajamas Media
Sunday, February 1st, 2009I can’t imagine a worse business position to be in than having to fire a bunch of bloggers. It must stink. Bloggers have a platform on which to air business grievances and for some, their stock in trade anyway is, well, grievances. Worse, I can’t imagine having to fire some of the best bloggers on the web. I can’t imagine continuing successfully being frozen out by those bloggers down the road.
Last Friday, turns out that most, if not all, Pajamas Media affiliated bloggers got the boot. Roger Simon, CEO, said that there just wasn’t enough money to continue. It’s not surprising that another business is feeling the economic pinch especially since ad dollars are scarcer than Britney Spears undies. Still, the pain it is causing is real.
Unlike others in this profession, I didn’t think PJM had a bad business model. In fact, I thought it was pretty smart. Take the best bloggers on the web, and talk to advertisers who would have their ads seen by thousands of readers across many different venues. Plus, the bloggers themselves would have money to count on so they could relax and focus on blogging.
When friends started getting the invites I watched with a mixture of jealousy and admiration. I was still a newbie though, had a young baby and a special needs child, plus for a year, homeschooling. My life was busy and my blog reflected a hectic schedule. I had no pressure. My blog posts tended to be long winded or short or whatever I felt like. At the start, it wasn’t so much about quality as it was just getting something out there and connecting to an intellectual world while stuck at home.
Other people, like Ann Althouse, were offered a position and took the moral high road. No way. No pay. Ann felt it would inhibit her independence. I didn’t think much of that argument then. I mean, who would police the bloggers? Turns out, that didn’t happen. But I respected Ann’s choice. Plus she, like my co-blogger John Hawkins made money with BlogAds, something I occasionally do myself. As Ann says, things have been slow since the election.
Pajamas leadership decides now, to turn toward TV. Now this, I don’t get. I’ve learned the hard way that video doesn’t work well with blogging. John Hawkins and I got in an argument about it. He said readers don’t watch them, they prefer transcripts. Well, that is just irritating because that means I have to transcribe which takes time and I don’t ever have enough time. So, I polled the readers and sure enough, they reinforced what John said. Due to server and bandwith constraints or just the stress of audio in the work place, people didn’t watch videos. They couldn’t.
I’m not saying videos aren’t a good idea generally. In fact, I feel like one thing that is missing on the conservative side are good, humorous short videos demonstrating leftist stupidity and/or teaching conservative principles in a funny way. Still, I’m not sure people would pay for them. Advertisers, though, might like to advertise on those…especially ones that go viral.
Anyway, times are tough all over. Writers are becoming commodities. There are a lot of great writers out there. There are no guarantees in the business.
The people who do it for fun and don’t make a living out of it might ultimately be in better shape. Ann Althouse is a lawyer. Other bloggers like Outside the Beltway’s James Joyner have talked about it before–that making money has been secondary to just saying how he feels. Plus, he has a “real” job. Now, I see that he, too, uses blogads.
The writers let go by PJM will survive. They are some of the best and brightest. I think that the bottom line is that many are artists not business people. Two different skill-sets. It helps to have both.
Chris Brogan
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009You’re Doing It Wrong
‘Course you could be so wrong, you’re right.
Wherein I Agree With Matthew Yglesias About The MSM’S “Status Anxiety”–UPDATED
Thursday, January 15th, 2009The Mainstream Media, it be troubled. As in, there are photographers like this Twitter guy who did on-the-spot citizen journalism (Was his picture less newsworthy because he wasn’t a reporter by trade? At this writing over 56,000 people have viewed it.) and there are commentators like me, who report and interpret real-time events like the debates or President Bush’s last speech to the nation. I can read the transcript and watch the President speak tonight and then comment on it (the President has aged and looks weary despite his optimistic talk). How is that different than the paid commentators?
Here’s the thing. I’ve never actually heard a crack investigative reporter tell me that the essence of good journalism consists of your work appearing in a non-blog venue. Similarly, I’ve never heard that from an intrepid war reporter. I think those people understand that if you uncover a major secret and write about it in a blog, or in a magazine, or on a newspaper that it’s all the same. Similarly, if you risk your life to get a first-hand account of events in a confusing war zone nobody will care if it’s a blog from the battlefield or a TV report. That’s because those people are doing journalism at its best and they know that their work stands or falls with the information contained therein.
But what Mike Barnicle and Mika Brzezinski and Pat Buchanan do isn’t like that. I say this as someone who likes their show and watches it almost every day, just like I hope people like my blog and read it every day. The three of them, and Joe Scarborough, are all in the same boat with me—we’re providing what we hope is an informative, entertaining product that’s fundamentally derivative of work being done by other people. But a passel of TV chatters and newspaper columnists and guys are accustomed to basking in the glow offered by people doing real reporting. There’s a lot of status anxiety. And this gets to be its worst, in my view, among the kind of people who do the sort of pseudo-reporting associated with following the President of the United States around. Convention dictates that if I sit at a desk and read a transcript of what the press secretary said and then write about the transcript, I’m a lowly cheeto-eater. But if I sit in the White House press room and transcribe what the press secretary said, and then write about the transcript then that’s journalism. Similarly, if I travel around with the president and then read the pool reports that my colleagues write and then write about that: Journalism. But if I read the newspaper account of where the president went and then write about that: Cheetos.
It’s a little silly.
It is silly. It’s silly when I hear Sarah Palin say it. It’s silly when I hear Sean Hannity say it. It’s silly when I hear reporters say it.
The truth is a little scary for those in the news field. The best and brightest bloggers don’t get their following by being unfair Looney-Tunes (Andrew Sullivan excepted). They get their readership by trying to present the facts from a point of view. The main difference between me and Matt is ideological, not, I suspect, a desire to present the issue fairly. That is, we come from different ideological standpoints, and we’re clear about our biases, but we want to present the issue fairly so that people can leave informed and form their own opinions.
How is that different from a journalist sitting in front of a camera or who happens to be in the White House press pool? With C-Span and other live feeds, I can see all that nonsense in real-time from the comfort of my high-back and laptop table. It’s not different.
One experience that stayed with me from the joint Blogger appearance on the BBC for election coverage with Jane Hamsher was that we worked essentially the same. And, we worked essentially the same as the news people themselves. We used the same data. We came to the same conclusions in points of fact. We came to some different conclusions about what the facts meant. And when the BBC reporters wanted to call a state that had not closed their polls yet, we bloggers nearly stroked out. There was no way we could report that, even though we both felt the outcome was certain based on the data. It’s called fairness and integrity. The best bloggers possess it, just like the best journalists possess it.
But bloggers go one further: they don’t pretend to be unbiased. They don’t feign objectivity. They present the facts from a point of view just like people in the news media do. Evidently, the Mainstream people tacitly admit that they’re biased. Sam Dealey in U.S. News says:
With the inauguration of America’s first black president less than a week away, it was inevitable that the self-obsessed media would insert their own diversity into the occasion. Sure enough, in his Monday Washington Post wrap-up, Howard Kurtz laments the lack of black reporters covering the White House as “a pale reflection of America.” Summing up the piece’s prevailing sentiment is the Post’s Michael Fletcher, who is black. “It feels like you would want to have black journalists there to bring a different racial sensibility,” he says.
Whoa, hold on a minute: Hasn’t the mantra from media types all along been that journalists are objective?
If we accept that black reporters will have a different take from their white colleagues on Barack Obama, does it follow that one of those views is more “accurate” or legitimate than the other? And now substitute “conservative” for “black.” Doesn’t this underrepresentation argument concede the point that conservatives have made all along about press bias? After all, it’s hardly a secret that most reporters and editors are liberal or left-leaning.
Oh yes, the liberal reporters and editors are biased, too. That they don’t admit it just means that they’re also delusional. The willful ignorance won’t save their profession. NYU professor Jay Rosen (whom I’ve sparred with on Twitter) has been prescient about the demise of Newspapers (and I would add, Talking Head) journalism. You can read what he wrote in 2005 about “laying the newspaper down to die“.
What can the MSM do to survive in this atmosphere? Do better. Be more informative. Be fair. Be more interesting. Be less sensational. Don’t take the audience for rubes and pretend at objectivity. State biases, connections and ways that your reporting might be slanted. That is, practice full disclosure.
The media still has the advantage. They come into people’s rooms every night. A long tail of people have to come find me or Matt Yglesias or Jane Hamsher or Twitter celeb photographer Mr. Krums online. We have to be sought out.
The irony of the Press’s blogger obsession is that they believe objectivity is their competitive advantage yet they so clearly lack it about their own profession.
UPDATED:
Well, I spent a wee paragraph explaining how the MSM could save itself. Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media says it’s too late:
It’s not stopping, either. Newspapers are the first to go, because they depend primarily on classified advertising, or what might be called “nearly classified advertising” – such as the display ads for jewelry and perfume in the Style section of a newspaper. Magazines are already feeling it as well. Look at a copy of Newsweek or Time next time you’re out. They are still hampered by the fact that it’s expensive to print on physical paper. Meanwhile, their virtual competitors can deliver “impressions”: people who see the advertisements, for far less, and provide content that’s literally up-to-the minute. In response, many magazines – especially trade magazines that don’t require glossy images – are already moving to web-only very.
What then? This won’t stop. Advertising-paid television is on the same track. I don’t have any use for broadcast TV any longer, I depend on cable. And I’m one of millions. And I know people who get all their television from YouTube or Hulu, by Netflix and by download.
To some extent, the television networks are protected by the relatively high cost of production. But that won’t last. Last night I was watching Ed Driscoll’s piece “The Red Queen’s Race“. Ed appears to presents it in the sepia-toned set of a Victorian mansion, but in fact he shot it entirely in his home studio. The whole “set” is digital. Steve Green shoots his PJTV segments in his basement. Mine are shot in my office. And blip.tv gives you access to an amazing variety of original content, made by semi-professional creators who will only get better with experience.
We’re only a few years – two to five is my guess – before the networks are in the same position as newspapers and magazines are today: their expensive, capital-intensive business model on the brink of destruction.
Weblog Awards 2008
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
Hey, here’s some of my recommendations for voting at Weblog Awards. I didn’t pick something for every category. If I don’t know the blog, I’m not pretendin’. Anyway, this post turned out to be a pain in my arse. The fact is, there are some categories, mine for example, that are crammed with great writers. In Best Individual Category (mine), two of my favorite writers are there: Rachel Lucas (best writer on the web, bar none), The Anchoress (best philosophical voice on the web, bar none), and James Lileks (who was not nominated but who writes like a pro–wait a minute…..he IS a pro). And then, in the best Big Blog Category, I couldn’t very well vote for my co-blogger’s competition, but Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom has been my source for erudite criticism since the beginning.
It was a little disturbing how many blogs I did know. Gah! I’ve spent a lot of time reading. No wonder I need freaking glasses. The LED light, I be blinded.
Oh, here’s the deal: you can vote once every 24 hours. The link is HERE. I know that you’re all lazy fussy-pants, but I’m not putting a link in for every category. Go to the main one and vote in the categories you like. Mostly, I think you should be reading these blogs.
Best Blog: HotAir
Best Humor: Mother May I Sleep With Treacher?
Best Comic Strip: Day By Day
Best Conservative Blog: Ace
Best Political Coverage: Townhall
Best Celebrity Blogger: Will Wheaton
Best Tech Blog: TechCrunch
Best Military Blog: Blackfive (Michael Yon is a Reporter. He’s an awesome writer and belongs in a different category.)
Best Law Blog: Volokh Conspiracy
Best Business Blog: Seth’s Blog
Best LGBT: Gay Patriot
Best Pet Blog: F*** You Penguin!
Best Culture Blog: Art of Manliness
Best Book Blog: Neil Gaimon has a blog? Who knew?
Best Fashion Blog: Manolo’s Shoe Blog
Best Canadian Blog: Five Feet Of Fury
Best Euro Blog: Wind Rose Hotel
Best Australian Blog: Tim Blair
Best Major Blog: Instapundit
Best Very Large Blog: Right Wing News (Duh!)
Best Midsize Blog: Betsy’s Page
Best Small Blog: Pirate’s Cove
Best Up and Coming: Sundries Shack
Remember, vote for me here. Thanks!
