April is the cruelest month – “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for bloggers. First, there was news of the potential health hazards of blogging, then Tax Day inexorably descended upon frantic freelancers. You could almost hear the millions of corporation-bound office workers breathing a sigh of relief as they shuffled to their nondescript cubes and resumed their quotidian tasks, thankful for automatic payroll deductions.
As a working freelancer who filed at the last minute, I have absolutely nothing bad to say about the IRS (hello, friends!), but I have my reservations about the New York Times piece. The writer admits that the hard numbers aren’t in yet on blogger mortality rates, but I’ll venture a guess that it’s a less dangerous occupation than, say, snake handling. Then again, at least snake handlers have antidotes they can administer should their jobs go awry.
Despite the gloom and doom, it’s still a great time to be a blogger. Sure, the competition remains as fierce as ever (if not more so), but this young field has proven itself to be remarkably flexible, vibrant, and promising. Need proof? See below:
Bloggers are enjoying a higher profile than ever before. The turning point, arguably, came in 2004, when the major political parties first invited bloggers to their national conventions and extended them equal billing with credentialed journalists. Four years later, many leading political bloggers are frequent guests on talk shows and political forums.
This visibility is not limited to the political arena, however. TV programs such as the reality series Top Chef and Iron Chef America have turned to popular food bloggers for commentary and drama, as have sports and tech news broadcasts with their fields’ respective bloggers. The blogosphere, like much of the Internet, has seeped into mainstream culture.
The mainstream media, and even some Internet companies, are still playing catch-up. Print media are finally incorporating blogs into their Internet arms, but for many publications, the changes have been slow in coming, and the efforts often seem scattershot. Each section of the New York Times, for example, includes several blogs, and I read them regularly, but they sometimes feel like they comprise a whole other site unrelated to the Times itself.
Also, I’ve worked at various Internet companies for more than a decade now, and take it from me – many of them have yet to find their footing in the blogosphere. I can think of more than one tech news outlet – the very industry that should be most aware of the blogging revolution – that’s dragged its heels in making the transition. Even Yahoo, the Internet pioneer, for the first time offered its users the ability to create blogs on its site, with the launch of Shine. (Full disclosure: I occasionally do contract work for Yahoo, though I have not worked on Shine.)
As mainstream media continues to decline, opportunities for bloggers can only increase. My first publishing jobs were in print media, so I always feel a pang when I read of diminishing returns for newspapers, book publishers, and the like. On the other hand, I’ve spent far longer working on the Internet than I did with books and magazines, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that there’s no turning back. The Information Age rolls on; only now we’re all free to take the driver’s seat.
