Who pays for the Blogs?

Chris Mooney has this article up at the Columbia Journalism Review calling for a blogger’s guild or union.

It’s not hard to think of problems with the idea. For example, Chris suggests that it is the successful bloggers who will have to spearhead any organizing effort, just as in-demand script writers drove the establishment of the Writer’s Guild. It could happen — but it does mean that folks already well placed have to put at least some of their goodies at risk to help the profession.

Then there is the question of who gets organized: the large media companies are obvious, but one of the properties of earlier organizing efforts in media unions was that there were some relatively high barriers to entry that made screen writers who had already shown they could do the work valuable enough to have some leverage. Barriers to entry is not the first concept one thinks of when it comes to bloggers (as the present writer offers a case in point).

But for all that, Chris is right on the fundamental issue. Blog writing is, or can be, a professional endeavor, for those who choose to take it to that level. Professional work needs to get paid.

If it isn’t, then eventually, even the most civic minded blogger has to grow weary. Individual bloggers, as Chris points out, have been able to drive some worthwhile bargains with some media outlets. That’s great for them, and good for everyone else, if only for the fact that it gets at least some proprietors used to paying the folks who bring the punters in the door.

But the more I overcome my initial “that thing’ll never fly” reaction to the CJR piece, the more I come to think that it will take some kind of organizing to create a blogosphere that can sustain itself past the initial rush that comes from climbing up on that digital soapbox.

(Note — as I write this in the auditorium at the NC Science blogging conference, Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics is chiming in with her radical notion that as blogwriting professionalizes, it’d be nice to get paid. As Arlo Guthrie might say — one more and it’s a movement!)

Image:  Robert Koehler, “Der Streik” (The Strike) 1866.  Source:  Wikipedia Commons.

Explore posts in the same categories: blogospheric tail chasing, Labor, science writing

Tags: picket lines, Science blogging conference, unions

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