The New York Times has a story today about bloggers working themselves to death:
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop.
Marc Andreessen makes fun of their sensational, over the top angle with a list of his own alternate headlines.
They document two recent bloggers who died and one that survived a heart attack: Russell Shaw, Marc Orchant and Om Malik. I am happy that they included Om. First, I saw him a few weeks ago and he looks better than ever. Second, Russell and Marc worked with us at Weblogs, Inc. and if Om hadn't been on the list the Times might have drawn the conclusion that working for me and Jason kills people -- and that's just not true.
They also mention that "those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post" which is a trip. In the early days of Weblogs, Inc. we paid $3.50 per blog post. Bloggers could do four posts an hour, so that was effectively $14/hour or $28K/year as a 40 hour/week freelance writing job. Nearly two years into the business we set a per post minimum of $10 across all of our sites with some earning much more.
Doing the same math, $10/post at four an hour is $40/hour and $80K/year. Of course, no blogger is doing four posts an hour for eight hours a day five days a week. Like Mike Arrington says in the article, it's not sustainable. It's just funny to see someone call that the low end when I can remember it being much lower.
Anyway, congrats to the NY Times for their successful exercise in blogosphere link baiting.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance
Comments (5)
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Anonymous 123 days ago
The NY Times got a link from you out of it, didn't they?
Brian Alvey 123 days ago
Yes they did. That's why I called their effort successful. ;-)
Dorie 122 days ago
To some degree, it is an impressive milestone to reach. Blogging is now recognized as a career with certain (perceived) occupational hazards. Perhaps the well-known bylines make the tragic occurrences appear more frequent. It's clear there are contract employers out there who create fair-trade standards. It reminds me that we are each responsible to strive for balance, WHATEVER the profession, just like we are each responsible for our own motivation. In the end, workaholism is a risk when we are blessed to do something we love.
Peter 119 days ago
I really don't understand this 'link baiting' argument.
First, the 'link bait' accusation is thrown around so often as to be meaningless. You write an interesting post and it's completely accurate? It's link bait. You write an interesting post and it's completely inaccurate? It's link bait. At least, according to all of you folks who accuse the Times of link baiting.
This is the umpteenth "duh! the nyt is like soooo teh stupid!" post i've read, and not one of them has offered any counterargument to what was in the Times' article - what's the basis? Why even bother to write meaningless words?
So far it's just a bunch of people telling us how stupid we all are for reading the New York Times. the reason? because the Times did an article on bloggers, apparently.
"Hey! They're talking about us, guys! Let's see how stupid they are, today! We're so smart and they're so stupid! Hahaha!"
is it really too much to ask for a simple counter-argument?
Brian Alvey 114 days ago
Their premise is flawed and sensational. Their argument sucks, so there is nothing to counter.
The four people they profiled -- two dead, one who survived a heart attack and another who is on his way -- were all entrepreneurs struggling with the stress of building blog networks. These weren't just freelance writers who died from blogging like the NY Times made them out to be.