On Blogs and Bloggers
This raises interesting questions about the role of blogs and whether the bloggers should be paid for their work. I think part of the problem is that there are two different entities called 'blogs'. The first is a column produced by paid journalists - Robert X Cringely's column in Info World is one such example. Such blogs usually come out on a regular schedule. The other type is produced by amateurs (in the strict sense of not being paid), and often, but not always, such offerings have no fixed timetable - they are produced when the author feels they have something to say. Such offerings reflect what the author's interests are, rather than the editorial line of wherever they are being published. Of course the line is blurred, there are many highly quality blogs produced by amateurs, but the key divide remains payment. The truth is that unpaid bloggers can write what they want and they may, as in the case of the Huffington Post, offer their output to commercial sources in order to get their musings to a wider audience. Journalists write what they are paid to write, whether they want to or not. I suspect a lot of bloggers aspire to become paid for their work. Be careful, you might get what you wish for - journalism is not all it's blogged up to be - it's hard work at all hours of the day and night, and mostly involves writing about things even when you have no inspiration at all. I can tell you this from personal experience - I was the production editor of a London listings magazine for several years. There were about sixty of us involved and I considered it an easy week if I didn't work 84 hours! The web is brilliant in that it has allowed people's creativity to flower, especially in prose writing. A lot of it is dross, but that's not the point. The point is that a millions of people got to discover that they could do things that they would never have had a chance, or the inspiration, to try otherwise. Of course the net itself is not without its own version of peer pressure, and that produced blogs from people who did it because all their friends were doing it - there are probably more abandoned blogs than there are live ones! But I digress. The question is, should bloggers be paid? Possibly. I think the defining issue is they should be paid if someone else controls the subject and the content of the blog. Otherwise it's a hobby, and people don't get paid for their hobbies. As a friend of mine whose antiques business had just gone bust once said to me, 'Never try to turn a hobby into a business - it doesn't work.'
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