New research by the blog search engine/aggregator Technorati shows that bloggers are being paid living wages -- an average of $122,222 for full-timer bloggers, in fact. (Surprised? Me too. When I was blogging, you got $20 a post, which for me was sometimes $.04 a word. By the end of my blogging days, they'd upped it to $50.)
But I think this Fast Company writer is trying to rock the boat. Bloggers aren't really getting rich from blogging, so much -- they're doing speaking engagements and setting up conferences. But still, they're professionals who have much in common with journalists, except that the blogger ranks are swelling as the number of journalists shrinks, reporter Kit Eaton asserts.
In other words, blogging is now a diverse, popular and successful enterprise that covers a multiplicity of online writers, from extensive Twitterers to self-described Mommybloggers to tightly written, up-to-the-minute, smartly edited online publications like this one--a "professional blog" by Technorati standards. And it's in that last sense that blogging is becoming a farm system for future journalists, who are apparently riding out the economic downturn pretty well (on average, at least). Think about that for a moment, and then remember how many traditional journalism jobs have been lost over the same period. So here's the radical suggestion: Let's redefine what blogging means. If you're writing self-absorbed or inexpert opinions about the minutiae of daily life, without hyperlinks, fact checks or any pretense at engaging with the news, you're a blogger. You probably fall into the lower categories of pay in the Technorati survey if you in fact make any money at all. But if you're a writer for an online publication, one that takes real-time stories, updates them as events unfold, reference your quoted facts, break stories and produce original writing then shall we just say you're a journalist? An online one, but a journalist all the same.
Read the rest at http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/blogging-dead-long-live-journalism.
-Adrianne (@msfener)
