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David Freedlander’s report is a fairly accurate reminder of once was was — organized online political power by a group of individual bloggers that is now in decline — and what the state of things is now as changes in the economic, political and media landscape have resulted in natural, if not desired, evolution.
I’m glad that one of the interviewees for the piece is Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerilla. She’s been part of the political blogosphere since 2001, and was one of the hubs of interest in the heydays of Netroots political power. But she’s also an independent blogger who didn’t land a windfall media job, or whose blog was folded into a media outlet. She has been out of work for four years, yet still furiously blogs as a labor of love.
That heyday I referred to above would be a bookmark saved prior to the 2008 presidential campaign, when much of the Netroots split into camps based on the candidates — were you for Hillary, Obama, Edwards, etc. (BTW, I was for John Edwards — for some reason people not familiar with my blogging at the time seem to assume I was for Barack Obama. I wonder why?) It caused a lot of fracturing in readership and support — as Susie notes in the Daily Beast piece:
“I supported John Edwards,” Madrak said. “And the Obama people were very vehement about what they thought about it. And they up and left the site if they thought you were being irrational about Obama. I still don’t know where they went. They just up and disappeared.” Although the Obama campaign raised a record amount of money online, they never quite made common cause with online activists.
And the fractures on the Left continue to exist, as we see so clearly here at FDL, there are Obama supporters (those who think he can do no wrong to pragmatic ones who see the alternative as disastrous) and a good-sized contingent of readers who see the failures and the positions of the current administration as proof he’s no better, or perhaps even worse than what we would have faced under McCain/Palin or a potential Romney/Ryan administration. I don’t see those wounds healing any time soon.
I’m less interested in that aspect of the article than the nuts and bolts reality of why this decline of political blogs is occurring from a media and economic perspective. One caveat – political blogs in this context refers to ones that were at the top of the political heap. Blogging and social media activism on a smaller scale — state level campaigns and niche topics (LGBT rights, organized labor, corruption in government) — seem to be doing OK to a degree, but still under a great deal of pressure to stay afloat, since they are driven not by personality or perspective/influence of a blogger than pushing information out to core believers, activists and supporters. But if you look at the blogtopia players at Netroots Nation several years ago, many have moved on.
“The blogosphere that we knew of in 2004 and 2008 is not what it was,” says Raven Brooks, executive director a Netroots Nation, an IRL annual meet-up. “It is still a tight community; it is just older, more established. The economy isn’t what it was then. A lot were students, and they have graduated and gone looking for jobs.”
A number of the major players in the early days of the movement have gone on to trade their skills into something more steady. Daou and Armstrong became political consultants specializing in digital outreach. Scher blogs for the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal advocacy group. Others, like Greg Sargent and Glenn Greenwald, ended up getting hired by establishment media outlets. And a few of the savvier, more entrepreneurial bloggers turned their own sites into more robust media outlets.
…The typing hordes have moved in another direction too. The pace of blogging was always punishing, and nearly impossible for those who did it to keep another job. But being marginally employed loses its charm after a while, even if you are able to elect the Congress of your dreams.
And what about the rest of us? I’ve been at this since 2004, and for me blogging has never paid enough to quit my demanding day job (PHB generates much less revenue since the move to FDL due to many reasons, including how the ad market [dys]functions). The fact is that long-form writing takes time and energy that my health currently doesn’t agree with a lot of the time.
With the recognition of my work on the blog over the last several years came even more time-sucks — endless emails asking me to promote one event/news item or another, requests to contribute writing to larger outlets (almost always for zero compensation, the presumption is that I should be grateful for exposure), asks to serve on panels (at my expense more often than not) — you get the idea. It was fun for a time when there was ad revenue to cover the expenses and my health held up, but you eventually hit the wall. And I did and have been paying the price for burning the candle at both ends. Not every blogger will land a media gig or get picked up and hired by an establishment organization (read: it has the money to pay you to quit your day job), so the rest of us have to sink or swim or get out of the game.
The political conversation, like the rest of the online conversation, has moved to Facebook and Twitter, and the bloggers steeped in an earlier Internet culture have not been able to keep up.
“Some bloggers have learned how to play well with a very dynamic Facebook community, with a very dynamic Twitter community, but a lot just don’t have the mental bandwidth,” said Henry Copeland, CEO of Blogads, which sells advertising on the Internet. “You need a density of folks who are excited about doing it. All of this stuff requires a community and as a blogger you want to be responding to other bloggers and be in the thick of it, and if the thick of things has just moved in another direction.”
What that translates into for me — I spend more time on social media (primarily Facebook, Twitter and G+) and it’s been a successful and more gratifying shift. It’s just how it is. There is certainly more direct feedback — look at the dearth of comments here most of the time. Maybe if there were Facebook comments in place it would boost more interaction; I think many readers aren’t interested in registering at various blogs just to dash off a quick comment.
Anyway, I just can’t keep up that pace of blog writing and offline activism up and hold down a FT job over a long period. As David Freedlander said, many of the high-profile bloggers moved into professional consultant roles, or were hired away by online or offline publications to boost their web political cred; much of the rest are withering away with a few managing to stake a claim for the ad market that is there.
What Freedlander didn’t mention is the decline and fall of newspapers and other traditional media over the same time period. Just this week Newsweek (part of the Daily Beast network…hmmm.) announced it’s going digital only. That’s a huge if not unexpected shift — it’s another bookmark on the media timeline. Publishers have been rocked by the success of e-books; Amazon sells more books for its Kindle than hard copies. The landscape is shifting for everyone. Is it good or bad, or just “change.” It’s obviously causing pain, as the scramble to adapt means jobs lost and people who need to re-tool themselves for jobs that require a different skill set. What’s happening to independent blogs is not occurring in a vacuum.
A logical question, going back to blogs, is does activism of the kind that flourished in the Netroots back in the day suffer? Yep. But things have morphed. The bottom line is people love free content, and at least in my case I don’t have the time to “sell” what I do; I barely have time to do it. The fact that the advertising world on blogs is dominated by Google makes it easier for those wishing to advertise to do so “economically” and more easily in their minds — at the expense of those independent blogs and their networks. So essentially there’s little incentive to do long-form writing except for personal reasons when I want to do it. And so I’m in full circle — back to why I did it in 2004, when no one was reading PHB and I had few ads. And that has to be OK? Who knows.
It’s not that independent political blogging is toast — after all the longevity of a blog post in the historical record far outweighs a short message on social media. A blog essay has more lasting influence; the problem is independent blogs don’t have sufficient value in today’s commercial space to sustain their existence — save for the lucky few people who have been able to monetize (or fundraise) for theirs to continue to exist.
19 Comments
The ones who believe they must vote for Obama are not the pragmatic ones.
I can sympathize. I’ve been blogging since just before 9/11…and my blog – What Would Jack Do? – is still about as little-noticed as ever. Part of me hopes that someone with a checkbook will notice and whisk me off the the Left-wing land of fortune and middling fame; alas; I’m still waiting, and I suspect that will remain the case.
I still have a lot to say, and I will continue saying it as long as it’s fun. Fortunately, my overhead is minimal, so it’s not as if I’m in financial straits. Still, after 11+ years, it would be nice to feel relevant.
Cheers….
I think what you are describing are the effects of despair, we’ve gone through an evolution of expectations that originally assumed things might change “if only the people knew enough”.
Now we have come to understand that people not only need to know enough, but they need to care enough.
That leaves us with a clearer understanding of the scale of our problem, but that understanding is not something that feeds the soul.
In the end people need to know, care, and have enough energy in reserve to maintain the effort needed to push for change.
It takes an exceptional person to clearly understand our situation, and keep striving in spite of that understanding.
As for Obama and the Dems–the Green Party candidates were arrested for trying to get into the debate hall and HANDCUFFED TO CHAIRS for 8 hours, left mostly alone in a warehouse that had been set up to detain protesters.
And the Dems think that I will ever vote for them again? Fascist assholes; they have no understanding of the Constitution or Democracy. All they want is power.
Thanks for the thought provoking post. I would add one comment however, as one who has gone from being a regular to a very occasional commenter, that the shifting circumstances of the political blogosphere isn’t entirely technological. Prior to 2008 a lot of the energy derived from the sense of one making a difference. It was worth the time for both posters and commenters to actively engage in the discussion, because one felt it was making a difference in the wider world.
The failures of Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, was a rude awakening to the fragility of our democracy, to how much we have already lost, and of how little power we have as citizens in our modern plutocracy and its encroaching neo-feudalism. I don’t know what the answer is, but I no longer think that the answer is on-line. Although I do expect on-line connectivity to continue to provide a tool for broader dissemination of political thought and wider activism.
I still rely on various blogs for reliable news coverage of politics and policy, but the sense of urgency of active participation has vanished. I don’t want to suggest that my experience is widely shared, but I just wanted to raise it as a contributing factor.
Post.
This. Well said phred. *Uptwinkles*
I remember preferring John Edwards to Hillary and Obama, who were fighting over the center. Edwards was saying the right stuff about the insurance banks, and I believed he was sincere. I started to wonder if it was an act when he paid $500 for a haircut. Later, he turned out to be “a really average” guy. How pessimistic is that?
I live in a state that is not contested. Jill Stein gets my vote. My DINO congressman gets a blank.
You said it phred! Two more things I would add, one that Pam talked about, is the whole net ad industry and of how they have not approached the blogs in as modern a manner as they should have. Relying on print media strategies is not enough, and I suspect that even they are realizing that now. The second thing is that technology itself has depleted the blogs of import. I find Twitter, in particular, to be the most damaging and quit frankly don’t understand it’s attraction at all. That said, I have moved a great deal of my online ‘activism’ to FB.
As an aside, I was just remembering a few days ago those heady days of the alt worlds. Remember the giddy futurism of alt.neutopia? It has all disappeared into the electronic universal black hole, as new blocks move in to occupy our consciousness. Hope the future is more than the next iPad.
You’ve done a much better job of explaining what I meant to say.
Thank you.
I’m curious why no ‘recommend’ option?
Thanks : ) Our posts crossed (it’s a starting and stopping kind of day) and I sat here nodding as I read yours.
So I guess my experience is more widely shared than I imagined ; ) Thanks for the kind words all.
Thank you, phred, well and truly said.
I wish to add several further thoughts, to the “opening which you provide:
While differences may exist between those who support Obama and those who no longer, in good conscience, can do so, there ought to be a general and EMBRACED understanding, that calling each other names, engaging in ad hominen attacks, and suggesting that those who will not support Obama are “racists”, is deliberately counterproductive to supporting and valuing those MANY interests which we have, and will continue to have, in common.
Now, while some who no longer support Obama may, at times, sink to that level, or close to it, the most vehement outrage and reflexive assaults consistently come from the hardline Democrats, whose behavior, in some cases, is remarkably similar to the “behavior” of the Republicans who those very same hardliners reasonably point out and often deride for their authoritarian control of their “stupid, go along, subservient” base and the Republican willingness to engage in outrageous and unreasonable assault upon others, to use fear and intimidation as standard “tactics”.
Such behaviors drive treasonable and thoughtful people away.
All of us, at this site, so far as I am concerned, owe to ourselves AND to each other, our continuing efforts to engage in “best practice” that we might seek to perceive and behave such that, even in our differences, our essential coalition of the shared understanding of our COMMON plight is not lost … for the cost of that loss is nothing less than the future, our future.
That said, I have found personally, over the last year, that what is required of all of us lies not only in participating on the threads, but in actively moving into the larger community of humanity to discover and build upon common interests and the actual needs of common humanity. It requires talking to AND listening to “the other”.
I suspect that some may deride this sensibility, which is certainly their “right”, yet I sincerely hope that it may be understood that wasting time and good-will has a terrible cost … and I, frankly, do not have enough of either to squander them, to waste them, or to pretend that neither matters.
I wish everyone, here, and elsewhere, the very best, for I consider that the very best is what we all deserve, to share and to cherish, as well as need …
Namaste
DW
As a citizen who wants good government, I look at politics in action in the real world and I see one thing in common between the right and left bloggosphere:
Democrats and Obama are evil and the enemy
The difference between the right and the left is
The right sees Congress as the democratic engine of power
while
The left sees the President as dictator, and Obama has failed to send all the evil Congress people to gitmo
If the left were to target the most right wing members of Congress as their number one priority in the same way the right has long ago picked off the most leftist members of Congress, we would be much better off.
Obama did not remove George McGovern from Congress. Democrats did not remove all those who shared McGovern’s political views from Congress.
Obama did not defeat George McGovern and then Tom Daschle for the Class 3 Senator from South Dakota. Nor did the Democrats defeat Russ Feingold
Your words ring true, but I’m concerned “learned helplessness” is real and its effects unfortunately redound to those in power seeking to keep (dejected) others out of it.
Freedom and individual rights –our constitutional democracy are all ideas. Unklike people, ideas cannot die. Ideas can propagate or they can fall out of favor. On-line is a great tool for propagation. Keep up the fight online and elsewhere.
I bookmarked and lurked at Pam’s House Blend back in the hey day, and I am so glad to read you on a much more regular basis at Firedoglake, where I lurk daily.
This post, and Jane’s on the same topic have really made me think (and miss the old days.)
Is there some way to help FDL and PHB? I’m willing to do what I can if anyone has suggestions.
thank you, pam for another fine in depth post and the thoughtful comments it has inspired.
phred @ 5, DWBartoo @ 13 and mulp @ 15:
i would like to add that my first contributions to a political candidate started with Howard Dean and ended when obama’s dual-citizen chief-of-staff ended Dean’s 50-state strategy which put obama in office as well as retained a solid pdemocratic majority in congress.
today i watch in disgust the kabuki that will lead to the xl pipline completion and the launch of the pirateship, TPP, that will complete global corporate rule until climate change ends that artificial construct.
meantime, i give whole-hearted support at the community level to local initiatives for people to improve their quality of life; and i’m happy to see some “green shoots” appearing as neighbors and local businesses are starting to support each other.
Just read Mz. Hamsher’s post about blog ad revenues, and am DELIGHTED to read YOUR post about same.
Sad to know you and others are back to square one doing it for the love, and that social media is becoming a larger interest for blogger writers . . . you explain the sitch so well above, I’m very greatful for your post.
Never would have known or understood all this on my own.
Will read more links from you and Mz. Hamsher on the google ad issue . . . seems they don’t have to legislate to suppress proggy blogging, they just made it impossible to do it for profit. Quite the typical corporate fascist strategy.
Best wishes, thanks for all you’ve done and do for the readers.
*bows*
Very, very shrewd and spot on analysis.
Describes MUCH of what’s happened with me in the past two years.
I’ll add, at some point, ranting and venting and preaching to the choir became a zero sum gain in the game of sharing and educating and informing.
The activists (Occupy, LBGT’s others) who are out there DOING things, have scored their point. Keyboard activism only goes so far in terms of change.
It’s great for informing and sharing . . . as a change agent, not so much perhaps at this stage of the technology.
Great post Mz Spaulding, great comments from some long time FirePups, ‘preciate it all. This ad revenue issue is a bit new to me, so I’m in the learning curve . . . it’s GOOD to learn new things about what impacts one’s life and the lives of others.
Best to all.