Mother Jones article on political bloggers

It hit the news stands a couple days ago, but now the Mother Jones article for which Maryscott O'Connor of My Left Wing was interviewed a while back appears in the online edition of the magazine:

"This is what happens when you crash the gates. All of a sudden, you're not just a pajama-clad kid in his parents' basement; once you've demonstrated your power and influence, people start demanding accountability and transparency. They want to know, for instance, that you aren't pushing a candidate MERELY because you (or your friends) have been paid by that candidate to do so."

Read the rest here.

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Blogging as a business

There really is a wealth of information, both in the essay and in the comments, in liberalamerican's Blogdom as high school. I may actually need to come back to it a few times to focus on different points.

The essay links to a profile of Atrios/Duncan Black which appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Black makes a living at this. He takes ads and since January has grossed about $5,000 a month, he says. He has few costs.

Earlier this week, peeder, who used to work as a contractor for Daily Kos, implementing Ajax code for the web site, wrote an essay entitled "Blogging as a business". Here are some excerpts:

Mr. Moulitsas has simultaneously increased his payroll from one to six (so far), gone into book publishing, conventioneering, and large-scale software development (and in the latter case, with only himself as the predicted customer). He succeeded in all of those areas to a very limited extent during the perfect storm and doesn't understand quite how risky they all are and how thin the margins are to mutually cover the risk. He needs to be a big bank to sustain any of these fragile, hits-based enterprises, but only has a little lifestyle venture going.
..
I wish I had better news about all this for him and his now several dependents. And of course he could pull it all (or enough of it) off. But if I were betting, I would say he's got about a 10% chance. Not of success. But of keeping that nice new house 24-36 months from now. The ante in any of these ventures is easily high enough to be ruinous. I've seen it all before.

And as he wakes up to realize his compounding risk level, he won't be able to bet enough on any of these risks to ensure any of them succeed enough to cover the others. He's a blogger, not a businessman.

Peeder's statement notwithstanding--even if Markos is "no businessman", Daily Kos is a business. He owns the brand, and his decisions are made in the interests of *his* bottom line. An excerpt from liberalamerican's diary...

The final piece of this may be the most interesting. Given that kos is a business, this latest move is what public relations people call repositioning. Daily Kos is repositioning itself as the central place for local blogs supporting political candidates. It is a brilliant business move with an election coming up. If the local bloggers buy into this, kos becomes in one stroke a major voice in the Democratic Party.

The $64 question is how much ideological control will kos exercise? His post gives a clue. He said, "Those are sites focused on the races that will determine whether we lose control of Congress, or whether we expand our numbers to Lieberman-proof majorities." In shorthand, kos had gone from Dean to Emanuel. Gone is the 50 state strategy. Gone are the progressive ideas. Instead he will publicize sites for candidates that can win.

Doesn't sound very "people powered" to me, except in that he's tried to use that as his branding. Kinda reminds me of the way Fox News tried to claim the words "fair and balanced" as a sort of trademark. I know all the arguments about how convenient it is to go to Daily Kos--how people don't go to the site for *him* but for the wide variety of offerings that can be found all under one roof. In a way, that keeps reminding me of WalMart. Even as I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the way Markos runs things over the past couple years, I hadn't stopped going there and was reluctant to stop posting there because of the convenience. And because of the chance, albeit small, of being "heard" by a larger audience.

One final point from liberalamerican's essay:

The more diaries you have, the chances are most of those diaries will be read only by a few people, friends, the few who stumble across them, and others. BUT every one of those diaries read reads gets counted as a read for the kos site. So let's assume kos has 500 diaries and each has ten readers--all of a sudden HIS SITE has 5,000 readers.

I'll be damned if I'm going to contribute to the success of his *business*, especially since it is becoming very clear that he does *not* share Howard Dean's belief in fighting in every state for every seat. So at minimun, "No link for you!" Markos. But I want to look at what can be done beyond that, because my own efforts will not be able to make a dent. All I do know is that, a lot of us stopped shopping at WalMart once we realized the cumulative effect of lots of individuals rationalizing that the convenience and prices were worth it. I hope more bloggers can start to consider the way their links to that site support a model of leadership that many of us find anathema--especially those of us who were inspired by Howard telling us "You have the power!"

By the way, I know this post is already kind of long, but while I'm on the topic, I highly recommend checking out this post at If I Ran the Zoo, addressing how "What's at stake here is the egalitarian and democratic nature of the blogosphere."

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It's what you do with what you've got

Crossposted at My Left Wing, ePluribus Media and Booman Tribune

I'd like to be able to let the blogroll issue go. That would be the more "comfortable" choice. I mean, this is shaping up to be everything I *don't* like to do in my free time. It's not fun to blog about, and it's not "nice". I open myself up to being trashed by people who will just *know* that this is about sour grapes or my nose being out of joint or heaven knows what else. It's the end of a long week, and I'd much rather kick back and relax a bit. Maybe play with my Sims, or watch a movie with the hubby. Or, short of that, work on some new designs that can generate some additional income--not "fun" in the traditional sense, but something I have a better shot at actually benefitting from in a "what's in it for me?" sort of way. This, on the other hand, looks like a great big bowl of no fun.

But I've seen enough arguments for why blogrolls do matter that I really don't feel like "letting this thing go" is an option.

At the end of January, I attended part of the Moving Faith Forward Leadership Retreat of We Believe. At the beginning of that first day, there was an opening prayer, and then a song. The chorus of the song (by Si Kahn) was

It's not just what you're born with
It's what you choose to bear
It's not how big your share is
But how much you can share
And it's not the fights you dreamed of
But those you really fought
It's not what you've been given
It's what you do with what you've got

This afternoon, I was thinking about those lyrics, and the idea of using the gifts one has been given. What are these "gifts" with which the Creator has seen fit to bless me? Well, the most relevant one to this situation would be my experience of being "on the margins" in one way or another. Being interracially married, homeschooling for a while, being the mother of a special needs/gifted child. Not gifts I would have *asked* for, but these experiences have made it a little easier for me to empathize with people who are disenfranchised in one way or another. People who are told by the power structures of society that they just don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

And those are the very people whose needs tend to be brushed aside as inconvenient or embarrassing when a blog like the big orange place becomes more aligned with the establishment. You say your vote didn't count? Sorry, we can't talk about that. People might call us crybabies. We'd better distance ourselves from you and call you a "fraudster". Concerned about issues of race? Gender? GLBT rights? Sorry, you're kind of inconvenient and embarrassing, so it's under-the-bus with you too. (But if you don't support us, and we lose, you are *so* taking the fall for it!)

Many bloggers have already posted about this issue. I agree with much of what others have already said, and linked to some of those thoughts in my earlier post. What I've tried to share here is why this matters to *me*, and why I feel compelled to renew my efforts to explore ways that the "little fish" can band together to make a difference.

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