In the latest Columbia Journalism Review, I have an essay that builds upon some blogging I've done here over the past few months--which, in turn, was inspired by the writer's strike out here in LA. In essence, in thinking about the strike, I have been inspired more and more to make the argument for unionizing bloggers, to help ensure payment and fair treatment. Now, Columbia Journalism Review has published the case--and this may be the most prominent articulation of it yet. Let me quote a few passages:
...blog traffic is growing. According to Technorati, which compares blogs with mainstream media Web sites using "inbound blog sources" (e.g., measuring how much a site is being linked to by other sites), the biggest media sites--nytimes.com, cnn.com--still have more linkage cred than any blog. But the blogs are catching up: in the fourth quarter of 2006, Boing Boing, a collaborative blog, had about a fourth as many inbound blog sources as nytimes.com (19,438 to 83,740), and The Huffington Post and Daily Kos had over an eighth as many (12,703 and 11,093, respectively). Tellingly, both The Huffington Post and Daily Kos were slightly ahead of The Economist's site--and considerably ahead of The New Yorker's. Even more tellingly, on Technorati's list of the hundred most-linked information sources, twenty-two were blogs. But blogs aren't just part of the proverbial marketplace of ideas; they're also part of the plain old marketplace--and site viewership, of course, translates into ad sales. (Profits add up quickly: A single, week-long, premium-slot ad run on Daily Kos, according to Blogads, sells for $9,000.) As top-tier blogs, in particular, become increasingly profitable, it will be fair to ask just how much of their proceeds are going to the writers who, ultimately, make it all possible.
So there's real money in blogs. But does that mean we should therefore unionize and pay every last blogger? Well, no. We would have to draw some distinctions:
Most bloggers, after all, don't draw very much traffic; neither are they part of a blogging conglomerate that is making real money selling advertisements. Were bloggers to organize, a threshold would have to be established between blogging "for fun" and blogging in a way that should be considered "labor"--between amateurs and professionals, if you will. Such distinctions are hardly unprecedented--the Writers Guild of America, after all, does not include everyone with a screenplay squirreled away in his sock drawer. That's why it's a guild--you have to be a professional to be a member and reap the benefits. Something similar could happen for the blogosphere. As Nancy Lynn Schwartz relates in her history of the writers guild, The Hollywood Writers' Wars, initial organizing was undertaken by an already successful group of writers--the Andrew Sullivans, as it were, of Hollywood in the 1930s.
And now, I'm interested in your responses. Let the wild ruckus begin.... And again, the full Columbia Journalism Review piece is here.
