I enjoyed this story. “Media executives sometimes operate under the impression that writers are interchangeable, or that they could even do the job themselves. Now we get to watch how that turns out.” This was culled from a bigger article that also serves as a link dump on the subject.
Blogging is hard, especially if you are trying to make a living at it, which, fortunately, I’m not. There are new bloggers who don’t know why they haven’t gotten thousands of followers and hundreds of dollars per day.
As someone said, “To make money you gotta have a niche, and you damn well better like that niche. ‘“This blog is about portraits of Abraham Lincoln molded from earwax. Our community is scattered around the globe but very dedicated.'”
bloguer est difficile
Blogging is hard because the blog is, ideally, a dialogue with your audience. Some of my best commenters have, to put it gently, been going through stuff. And one, Dustbury, died last year. Uncomfortably, on 09/09/2019, my blog received 1703 views, 1479 specifically about his death.
One of his fellow acolytes, Fillyjonk, who has had recent troubles of her own, has been blogging over 18 years.
If you don’t want to write about COVID-19 every single day – and I don’t – blogging is particularly hard. I can’t write about the plays and movies I saw because I didn’t see them. Because my wife and daughter are home, I’m not able to carve out as much Roger time as the retiree had gotten used to having.
Perhaps there are folks out there watching videos, bingeing on TV series, and devouring books. To quote the poet, I ain’t me, babe.
So why do it? Why blog? Because there are things I wouldn’t know if I didn’t blog intermittently. In fact, there are things I’d forget in five minutes if I hadn’t blogged about it. Admittedly, there are few things I blogged about and still forget about.
And I blog to maintain my sanity (if any), my equilibrium. I try to keep my mind working trying to find the next subject.
Back in the early days of this blog, i.e., 2005, a bunch of bloggers – Fred Hembeck, Lefty Brown, Greg Burgas, Johnny Bacardi, Thom Wade, Eddie Mitchell, Gordon Dymowski, Tom Collins, and several others across the country- created a series of mixed CD exchanges. We’d burn collections of music and mail them to each other. Kind of quaint, eh? This was one of the earliest I created, if not the first. It’s an American album of sorts.