I’m fascinated by the fact that I’m not getting any money to blog. Still, I’m at it.
Last year I went to a congressional hearing as a reporter for a fancy magazine that was paying me several thousand dollars for the beautiful experience and I noticed that there were three bloggers there, making nothing. Back then I thought: there’s something wrong with this industrial model; when all this shakes out and rationalizes itself economically, we’ll all file our reports and share that several thousand dollars, and everything will be copasetic.
Then I met the genius Craig Newmark (of craigslist.org) and told him about the incident. Newmark set me straight. All three guys are getting compensated. In different sorts of ways. Maybe because they love it, or want to pamphleteer, or think that some day they’ll make money or make a name for themselves…
Newmark is obviously right. It’s stunning that at the oxygenless height of corporate journalism, people are acting individually to change the way media function. Who knows where this is going? But for now what can be clearly said is, Blogging celebrates a different set of values—nonmaterialistic ones…
