A couple of days ago I was interviewed by Omar Gallaga from the Austin American-Statesman for a story he was doing on the state of Austin political blogging as part of the Statesman’s coverage of Netroots Nation.
The story appeared today as the lead story on the main page (yeah, another slow news day here in the state capitol).
Here’s the headline:
Political bloggers gaining more clout — but it’s no way to make a living
I’m quoted down near the bottom of the story (four paragraphs devoted to Undergrounds.com Urbangrounds.com):
Conservative bloggers such as Robbie Cooper, who writes Undergrounds.com, say they admire the strides liberal bloggers have made.
“They definitely outpace the conservative movement on online mobilization,” Cooper said. “I think the conservatives can learn a lot from it.”
Cooper, whose site gets about 1,200 page views a day, jokes that he’s the most prominent conservative blogger in Austin; “I think there’s three of us.”
Advertising pays for his domain registration and hosting fees, and “a few dollars left over for a beer here and there.”
It’s a good and fair article — just wish he would have at least got the name of my site correct. Oh well.
Oh, and I also told him I get about 1200 unique visitors/day. My page views is a bit over 2000/day. Small difference, I know — but just wanted to throw that out there for the sake of accuracy.
Thankfully, the online version of the story allows comments, so I was able to make a note about the correction there.
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As to the content of the article — while I’d love to be able to blog full time as a career, there’s just no way I’m willing to take that kind of pay cut from my current full-time paid career as a writer.
Not even close.
Although, I probably understated my ad revenue (mostly from text-based link ads) — in addition to paying for my hosting and domain registration (and a few beers), I’m also able to pay the notes on both of my motorcycles from my blog revenue.
So, while there is some money to be made blogging (even as a conservative in Austin), it wouldn’t be enough to live on.
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UPDATE —
I received really nice emails from both reporters who worked on this story (Omar Gallaga and Lilly Rockwell) apologizing for the name mix up.
I’ve been a professional writer for far too long to realize that editorial blunders occur from time-to-time. Not for one moment did I ever consider that it was done intentionally.
As Omar wrote in his email:
I’m particularly annoyed that the mistake happened to the one conservative blogger in the story. I can’t tell you how frustrated that makes me for what that makes us look like.
As I responded, “No worries.”
Omar said that they’re working on getting the online version corrected, and would print a correction in tomorrow’s paper.
while I’d love to be able to blog full time as a career, there’s just no way I’m willing to take that kind of pay cut from my current full-time paid career as a writer.
Tell Larry, Moe, & Curley, that it’s time for them to pull their own weight and to go out and get jobs. No more free kibble.
Left by Anonymous on July 17th, 2008 at 8:50 am