It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that no one in big time politics or journalism would come near me with a ten-foot pole, let alone give me money to write posts favourable to them. This is because I'm not what you would call a "people person", and I rarely write "favorably" about much of anything. Besides, you folks seem to enjoy my bile.Oh, and there's all the writing I do about pussy. "Serious People" tend to be turned off by that, although I do know that I'm read in various parliamentary offices and at least one major newsroom. Probably primarily for the pussy stuff. God knows that I never see my political views reflected anywhere outside of my own blog, although Skippy-san at Far East Cynic comes very close.
Look, I know exactly how to go about becoming a gigantic political blogger. It really isn't that hard, if any of you are interested.
Firstly, you pick a side and you stick with it; regardless of your personal feelings, or what you can physical feel is wrong, stupid, or actually repulsive. You never criticize your own team. You do, however, go after the other team relentlessly, no matter how boneheaded, wrong, hypocritical or immoral those attacks might be.
Secondly, you build a theme and stick with it. Just like in politics, never deviate from the main message. Coordination with other bloggers and "wired-in" party people is always helpful in that regard. Once you join a "pack", bigger bloggers in the pack will start to link to you, until you eventually become a bigger blogger yourself.
Third, you never write about anything other than politics. Sure, there are a couple of exceptions to this, but they tend to prove the rule. Dan Riehl made his name with missing blondes, and the Ace of Spades HQ is pretty much the spiritual father of my blogging style. But he's nowhere near as graphic as I am, nor should he be.
If you want to be a big blogger, look at what I do, and do the exact opposite. You should be just fine, although there is a certain amount of soul-selling involved. I'm not going to lie to you about that. But you just might make yourself some money. Not a lot, but some.
Okay, some more than others.
Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information “like piranhas in a pool.” But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.
“It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”
In California, where former eBay executive Meg Whitman beat businessman Steve Poizner in a bitterly fought primary battle in the campaign for governor, it sometimes seemed as if there was a bidding war for bloggers.
One pro-Poizner blogger, Aaron Park, was discovered to be a paid consultant to the Poizner campaign while writing for Red County, a conservative blog about California politics. Red County founder Chip Hanlon threw Park off the site upon discovering his affiliation, which had not been disclosed.
Poizner’s campaign was shocked to learn of the arrangement, apparently coordinated by an off-the-reservation consultant. For Park, though, it was business as usual. In November 2009, for instance, he approached the campaign of another California office-seeker — Chuck DeVore, who was then running for Senate — with an offer to blog for money.
“I can be retained at a quite reasonable rate or for ‘projects,’” Park wrote in an e-mail to campaign officials. In an interview, Park defended himself by claiming, “nobody has any doubt which candidates I’m supporting,” and noting that his blog specifies which candidates he “endorses.”
But while Red County’s Hanlon expressed outrage at Park’s pay-for-blogging scheme, questions arose about his own editorial independence when it emerged that Red County itself had been taking money from the Whitman campaign.
In December of 2009, Red County received $20,000 from the Meg Whitman campaign, which has sent the site $15,000 a month since then.
The money is ostensibly for advertising, yet by conventional measures the numbers don’t add up. According to Quantcast, Red County reaches around 125,000 unique viewers per month. Two new media industry experts confirmed that, given such a readership, Whitman’s ad purchase is “ridiculously” expensive, surpassing the going market rate for such ads by 1,000 percent or more.
Oh. Who knew? Okay, I did, although I had no idea that it was actually that widespread. But I have heard things over the last few years that made this among the most unsurprising stories I've commented on in a long time.
I sort of doubt that those kind of ad payoffs occur in Canada very much. I think that my country's bloggers - in every political party - are paid directly and in secret, if only because the U.S has far stricter campaign finance laws and reporting requirements. Canada's a political backwater, which means that you can get away with quite a bit more. Maybe the funniest story I know of is a Canadian blogger who was paid by an American lobbying company to write about U.S elections.
Would I do it? If you've read me for any length of time, I think the answer to that is pretty obvious. I already have a job that I utterly despise, and I don't think that I could tolerate another one. If I could survive a week essentially taking dictation from some party hack, I'd be surprised.
I routinely write 1,500 word posts because I want you to know what I think and why I think it. Could I secretly do that on behalf of somebody else? Probably, but I don't want to. I do this because it's fun for me and it sharpens my own thinking. The second it stops doing either is when I stop doing it entirely. And I'm tempted to quit a lot already. There are days when this is a giant pain in the ass, and those days are a lot more frequent than they used to be.
Although there aren't a lot of you out there reading this, I get the feeling that most of you actually trust me, even if you don't often agree with me. And more than a few of you have said exceptionally nice things about me in public when you didn't have to.
I primarily do this for myself, but I also do it for the people who have been here for months or years. I've made friends doing it, and it's also gotten me laid plenty. I don't think that I could trade that in for a paycheque, especially if that meant having my fun thing taken away from me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not condeming anyone who actually does do pay-for-play blogging. They have bills to pay, just like everybody else. If you can make a living sitting at your home computer in your frilly unmentionables, more power to you.
But I like the independence of doing this for fun. And it wouldn't be fun without that independence. That's why I've never had a PayPal button or taken advertising or asked for much of anything from you, other than solicited for a few charities that I felt strongly about. Yes, my girlfriend added an Amazon widget on the blog this weekend that I hope you make your purchases through because I would at least like all of this work to get me a free book from time to time.
Anyhow, those are my two cents. Now go buy a book.
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