Crack for Journalists: The Economics of Blogging

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Thanks to Time.com and Justin’s lending me his space, I’ve had the chance to guest blog here for a week. In my last entry, I’d like to take a shot at some thoughts about blogging itself.

A friend of mine who asked not to be named calls blogging “Journalist’s Crack.” Blogging, by which I mean doing-opinion heavy quick hits (it can mean other things, but let’s stick with that for now) offers journalists instant gratification at little cost. It is easy and it is addictive. There are some blogs that are heavy on original reporting and analysis. Another version of blogging–and this is the one you’ll find most often on Time.com–is one in which reporters use their blogs for more personal, more offbeat stories and takes on the news. But one thing that almost all blogs do sometimes and some do exclusively is take the stories of the day and juggle them about in the hope that subjecting the news to the centrifugal force of this spin cycle will yield new and valuable ideas.

Journalists love doing this in part because over the years they have been pushed to squeeze more and more of the viewpoint and analysis out of their writing in the name of objectivity. So the blog lets them cut loose. It gives them a satisfaction that’s hard to get from doing original reporting, and it’s much easier than doing original reporting as well. And it lets them feel like they’re part of a community, “the blogosphere.”

If this makes blogging popular with writers, it is even more popular with publishers. Journalism that spends its time commenting on others’ reporting is, from the point of view of maximizing page views while minimizing work, a very good deal. A heavily reported story in a major publication can take weeks of work and yield three pages online. A quick hit commenting on that story can give you a page (on which you can sell advertising) with only minutes of effort. Ideally, in the end, everyone benefits from this. Sometimes the blogged commentary really does add to the news. Sometimes it just directs readers to it, and that’s not a bad thing. In fact, you’ll notice that even as a guest blogger I’ve done this a couple of times, like an item a couple of entries back whose main point is to direct readers to an interesting story from the Associated Press.

But look through the kaleidoscope for a while, and your head can start to spin, and you start to notice that the economics of blogging can be curiously similar to the economics of online pornography. Online porn is a constant bait and switch, site after site full of ads that refer you, in turn, to more sites full of ads. To finally get out of this endless tease you have to hand over your credit card number and pay for the “real content.” But plenty of porn site operators seem to do well simply pushing you from one ad-filled site to the next.

One difference between news and pornography on the web, however, is that in the main (with the big exception of the Wall Street Journal) the news is free. So there is no cash bonus for “the real stuff”–original reporting. This makes the economics of posting links to other people’s stories, bedecked with insta-commentary and clever headlines, extremely compelling. Often, by the way, the analysis is remarkably ungenerous to the folks who did the reporting that set things in motion.

Guest blogging is not like real blogging, and guest blogging on the Time.com site, which is not really geared toward maximizing page views through a quick rotation of stories, is especially not like real blogging. My interest as a guest blogger is mainly in elucidating a viewpoint that might entertain, capture the audience’s attention, and maybe even move the public debate. What’s more, as a guest blogger, I am not paid. This gives me a certain kind of freedom. I have little interest merely in maximizing the number of posts I put up in the hope of maximizing page views and what the industry calls “advertising impressions.”

If, however, I was writing a blog in which my bosses were counting on me to do that, I know very well what strategy I would pursue. I would spend the bulk of my time posting links to other people’s stories. I would hope that my commentary wasn’t entirely superficial. It could not be so consistently superficial that readers would simply give up on my blog. But the premium, for a blogger interested in maximizing revenue, is always going to be on doing the kinds of items that let you put up posts quickly. Little original reporting. In a blog about business or economics, little painstaking analysis of the numbers. Put bluntly, blogging that is largely parasitic on the work done by others looks like its remarkably cost effective.

Now I want to be careful here and caution that as I said before, “blog” is a catchall term that can mean a lot of different things. It can mean finding and posting original documents, as The Smoking Gun. It can mean doing in depth analysis of financial documents, as you’ll find at Footnoted. It can mean doing news too local for big media, as my favorite local real estate blog, Brownstoner, does. And sometimes it can mean commenting on other media, as Gawker does in a way that just kind of becomes it’s own thing.

I’m suspicious in general of gloom and doom projections, and would not be the one to predict that the blog will be the mausoleum of all the hopes and desires or “serious” journalism. The same thing was said of television and … okay, it was mainly right about television but the news did survive nonetheless. But it does seem to me that to the extent that online journalism bifurcates into reporting and commentary, it may have the effect of demonstrating how much better the economics of commentary, blogonomics, are to the economics of generating new reporting.

To that I offer no solutions. That’s the good thing about writing about economics, a subject that is amenable to laying out facts and leaving the shoulds and oughts to others.

Update: One commenter, “Dizzy Wasp,” complains that most blogs are shorter and sassier than this entry. Dizzy Wasp, you’re right! Oh, so right. I’ve crossed out the throat clearing to get to the point.