Blogging

My fellow blogger Patrick Sullivan (Coiled Pleasures) is having a crisis of faith about the energy he puts into his blog and into message boards. I commented:

Myself, I am liking blogging much more than the message boards (which, as I've written in my blog, never live up to their promise)...blogging is mainly a form of thought capture for my individual pursuits, and the breadth of subject matter is up to me alone, not some external agent, which I very much appreciate. Since I'm not Lewis Lapham, I can't afford to publish magazines entirely tailored to my specific interests, but this is a nifty equivalent. I also like the fact that the posts do not have to be essays or reviews or even miniature versions of such -- as snippets they have their own shape and aesthetic.

I don't mind having some readers, not at all. How hard I would "promote" the blog to have more readers, I'm not sure -- certainly I haven't done so yet. But I am proud of a number of the posts.

Patrick made a comment about his blog posts which interests me (my bolding):

The fishing and movie posts have a few good lines that could be used elsewhere (so goes the current thinking) but the rest is pretty much pure drivel.

I imagine that what Patrick means by "elsewhere" is publication for pay, since he is also a published writer in that sense. But here's what I think: publication for pay is largely going away, thanks to the very instrument of publication that Patrick and I are using.

The Internet has been, for all its flaws, the most miraculous democratizing force in the history of the written word. This is not just a return to the world of the 18th century pamphleteeers, this is better. For essentially no outlay beyond the possession of a computer and an Internet connection I'd have anyway for other reasons, I can self-publish in an attractive format and reach a worldwide audience. With a little properly applied PR skill and virtual schmoozing, I can expand my readership as much as I would like. Beat that!

But the downside is money. Free content appears to be in the Internet's very DNA; users just don't want to pay for what they get here, and why should they? We have learned decisively that human enthusiasm trumps the desire for remuneration. Literally billions of person-hours have been invested in creating free content for this medium; that isn't changing and very few can run successfully counter to it.

I posted last month about how Mike D'Angelo, the Master Snark of Film Criticism, has seen his freelance income dry to almost nothing. He's not the only one, and there has been a lot written about that this year. Now, film criticism is particularly affected by the Internet explosion because there are thousands of would-be critics out there, and many of them are just as good as the competently professional but ill-tempered D'Angelo. How is he supposed to differentiate -- get snarkier? There's no value proposition there. So the existing cadre of "professional" film critics is getting less paid work, and getting paid less for it (D'Angelo's rate at one publication was cut in half).

I'm not sure how writers will make their money in the future; although I am sure they won't stop writing. Oh, you'll still get paid if you get a piece into The New York Times Magazine; but that won't be any easier than it has ever been. There will still be some money in the mountains; almost none in the foothills.