October 26, 2002
As I was rallying some of the blog troops to help me weave some empowering wishes for b!X’s birthday, I spent some time on sites I haven’t visited in a while. As I expected, I had missed the boat on some important recent conversations, including one on the ethics of getting paid for blogging. AKMA’s post got me thinking, belatedly, of course, and I’m sure others have said similar things and I missed them. But here’s my opinion as a “personal” blogger who doesn’t expect to ever get any financial compensation for what I write here.
I'm a poet. A published poet. Poets rarely get paid for our poems. Sometimes we get complimentary copies and $25. Big deal. But we continue to write because we're poets. The bloggers I read most are in the spirit of poetry -- creative writers with something meaningful to say that causes some shift in the minds and hearts of those who read what they have written. If they start receiving compensation for their blogging efforts, and IF that fact winds up being reflected in their blogs, I'll probably stop reading them the same way that I immediately click off pop-up ads. Because when they mention in their blogs something about the sources of their compensations, that's advertising.
Journalists and commentators are paid within the context of their parent publications, and it's the publication that handles the advertising so that the writers are not under that influence. And those journalists and commentators also function under pretty strict professional parameters and standards for what they can have published. Blogging has been by-passing all of that -- no parameters, standards, and oversight; no compensation. While it's possible that a blogger can be paid for blogging and not be expected to provide some visibility/advertising in return, given the history of what we can expect from human expectations, I can't see it working any other way. If that becomes the case, as I said, I just won't bother reading the bloggers whom I know have a financial stake in what they write. My time's too valuable to waste trying to determine what's real and what's Maybelline.
Actually, AKMA summed it up for me in his response to an email I sent him when he responded:
If someone who loves passionate prose started paying Mike Golby, I'd give thanks that someone realized that he deserves support. No simple litmus test will tell us whether Mike has sold out, whether the Möbius bloggers sold out; we just have to use our bullshit detectors and arrive at our own assessments.
I keep thinking that wouldn’t it be great if some passionate lover of democracy and the freedom of information that makes it possible would offer financial support for b!X’s two blogs. (Besides me, of course.)
At this moment b!X is arriving in San Francisco to join the anti-war march. (After he has breakfast.) He’s supposed to be providing .wav files as updated information. It doesn’t seem to be working perfectly yet.
Comments now powered by HaloScan. Click here to read this entry's comments (if any), or to post one of your own.
Old Comments (0)