Unionized Blogging

Just what you need on a Monday morning is the press, Techcrunch, wall street journal and others talking about unionizing bloggers because. Pick your reason; pick your method, the idea of unionizing bloggers should be a wake up calls that blogging is defiantly changing. While the idea of raising quality is a good thing, everyone could stand a bit more quality including our groupings of blogs.

We would love to hire bloggers, so the only way that we can do this is to essentially do piece work, just like how stringers work. Stringers is a journalistic phrase for folks who write stuff and pray it gets on AP, or independently roam the planet trying to get the good stuff, good video and turn around and sell it to the local, national, or international press corps. It is a long cherished tradition in formal journalism.

The idea of unionized blogging is something altogether though. With people coming and going from the field, blogging groups like Live Journal, Spaces and Blogger where it is your average Joe yakking about the things that are important to them, or their love life, or how much they hate their jobs, their lives, everything is more of a personal stream of consciousness issue. These are not professional journalists, they do not pretend to be professional journalists, and the only reason that Adsense is on their web site is so that they might make 20 dollars a year.

When you get into conglomerate blogging, groups like Helium, and others, sure folks are paid on their popularity, once you hit the “big time” or the idea of popular, then ok, but there are also upper limits on it, getting more popular once you hit the top of the curve, there is no additional benefit to the process. Large community blogging groups wring their hands, wish they could pay more, but this also leads to churn in the blogging community. Once you peaked, there is nowhere else to go, and the writers move on to the next challenge. Is this what the groups want to unionize?

Then there are the companies just starting out, how are they going to work from their living rooms and pay union wages? They won’t they will hire stringers who work on a per piece basis, so the unionized system will be undercut until they actually hire or determine based on popularity that they want to hire the writer.

Realistically, this is another herding cats exercise, just like a bloggers code of conduct. Should something real happen because of this that will be interesting to see how they are going to implement it outside of the larger blogger trade groups. The disparity between CEO and average employee pay is common, we see it everywhere, and it is no surprise that it is happening in the blogging world either.

But this is also a great time to plug the idea that we are looking for stringers, sign up over here.